An exploration of aphasia symptom profiles in speakers of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic)

Conceptions and delineations of aphasia syndromes should be informed by crosslinguistic descriptions. This is particularly important for languages that are highly dissimilar to widely studied languages like English. Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) is one such language – a polysynthetic language of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family spoken by approximately 60,000 people in Greenland and Denmark. A previous study of five Kalaallisut speakers with aphasia (Nedergaard et al., 2020) indicated that non-fluent aphasia in Kalaallisut exhibited different features from those found in English and similar Indo-European languages. However, the previous study was limited by its low number of participants, its focus only on semispontaneous speech narratives, and the fact that a more complete description of the symptom profile of aphasia in Kalaallisut was not available. In the present study, we tested a total of 42 speakers of Kalaallisut on repetition tests, language production tests, language comprehension tests, and working memory tests. We used a combination of qualitative judgments by a speech and language pathologist and hierarchical cluster analysis to analyze the results and were able to distinguish between presence or absence of aphasia, between levels of severity of aphasia, between apraxia of speech/dysarthria and aphasia, and to some extent between different subtypes of aphasia. The present study corroborates the results from Nedergaard et al. (2020) and highlights challenges associated with conducting research in communities with healthcare systems without trained speech and language pathologists, no previous agreed-upon diagnostic criteria, and little access to advanced neuroimaging.