Study Protocol: The Effect of Bilingual Exposure on Linguistic and Cognitive Recovery Following Stroke

This is the study protocol for the \"The effect of bilingual exposure on language and cognitive recovery in children following stroke\" project. Protocol Summary - Children with pediatric stroke face complex cognitive and linguistic challenges due to the sensitive timing of the stroke occurrence during the child’s development. Literature in typically developing bilinguals has shown that bilingual learning environments promote positive neural and cognitive development, affording certain linguistic and cognitive advantages. Whether this is the case and may affect enhanced recovery in children with atypical development is still unknown. The purpose of this study is to determine how bilingual exposure affects cognitive and linguistic recovery in children following pediatric stroke, by looking at differences in performance on outcome measures between the bilingual pediatric stroke group with respect to patient variables (sex, family history/education), stroke variables (age at stroke onset, location, laterality) and linguistic variables (language background). Medical charts will be reviewed to identify bilingual patients and compare their performance to monolingual patients based on their Pediatric Stroke Outcome Measure (PSOM) performance, sourced from the institutional stroke registry. Growth curve analyses on subscales of the PSOM, with respect to patient, stroke and linguistic variables (language background). Additionally, a case study will be conducted on a bilingual and monolingual patient, comparing their neuropsychological assessment scores.