Impaired Number Word Production: A Bilingual Chinese-English Case Study

We report the performance of a bilingual Chinese-English speaker (RC) who makes selective errors on number words in both languages only when the task involved processing the number word phonologically, either in the input modality or in the output modality. RC sustained a mid-cerebral artery occlusion resulting in non-fluent aphasia. Several experimental tasks were used to tap RC’s ability to access numbers in both languages under different contexts. The purpose of these tasks was to examine the patterns of number word production problems in this patient and to functionally locate the deficit within current models of language production.