Syntactic and Morphosyntactic Processing in Stroke-Induced and Primary Progressive Aphasia

Abstract

Abstract. The paper reports findings derived from three experiments examining syntactic and morphosyntactic processing in individuals with agrammatic and logopenic variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA-G and PPA-L, respectively) and strokeinduced agrammatic and anomic aphasia (StrAg and StrAn, respectively). We examined comprehension and production of canonical and noncanonical sentence structures and production of tensed and nontensed verb forms using constrained tasks in experiments 1 and 2, using the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS [57]) and the Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection (NAVI, Thompson and Lee, experimental version) test batteries, respectively. Experiment 3 examined free narrative samples, focusing on syntactic and morphosyntactic measures, i.e. production of grammatical sentences, noun to verb ratio, open-class to closed-class word production ratio, and the production of correctly inflected verbs. Results indicate that the two agrammatic groups (i.e., PPA-G and StrAg) pattern alike on syntactic and morphosyntactic measures, showing more impaired noncanonical compared to canonical sentence comprehension and production and greater difficulties producing tensed compared to nontensed verb forms. Their spontaneous speech also contained significantly fewer grammatical sentences and correctly inflected verbs, and they produced a greater proportion of nouns compared to verbs, than healthy speakers. In contrast, PPA-L and StrAn individuals did not display these deficits, and performed significantly better than the agrammatic groups on these measures. The findings suggest that agrammatism, whether induced by degenerative disease or stroke, is associated with characteristic deficits in syntactic and morphosyntactic processing. We therefore recommend that linguistically sophisticated tests and narrative analysis procedures be used to systematically evaluate the linguistic ability of individuals with PPA, contributing to our understanding of the language impairments of different PPA variants.

Is descriptive writing useful in the differential diagnosis of logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia, Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment?

“…This higher use of verbs may be due to anomia in lvPPA. The higher percentage of verbs was observed in descriptive speech of patients with lvPPA relative to controls [35] and patients with nfvPPA [36]. While patients with nfvPPA present with more impaired verb naming than noun naming, this effect is not present in lvPPA [37].…”

Preservation of passive constructions in a patient with primary progressive aphasia

“…Written sentence comprehension was relatively intact for the first two years of tracking but a marked decline was evident between years 2 and 3 ( Figure 1c). Thompson et al (2013) also report syntactic comprehension difficulties in groups of logopenic PPA patients between 2.8 and 3.9 years after symptom onset. In this group report, participants with logopenic-variant PPA typically displayed greater impairment of processing sentences with canonical word order (e.g., actives and subject relatives) than non-canonical structures such as passives.…”

“…Agrammatic performance on sentence-picture matching tasks can be at or below chance when sentences are semantically reversible (Ansell & Flowers, 1982;Berndt, Mitchum, & Haendiges, 1996;Caramazza & Zurif, 1976;Schwartz, Saffran, & Marin, 1980). Syntactic comprehension impairment can be present in people with different neurological profiles, including patients with vascular aphasia and those with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) due to frontotemporal degeneration (Gorno-Tempini, Hillis, Weintraub, Kertesz, Mendez, Cappa, ... Grossman, 2011;Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, & De Bleser, 2011;Martin, 2006;Thompson, Meltzer-Asscher, Cho, Lee, Wieneke, Weintraub, & Mesulam, 2013;Wilson, Galantucci, Tartaglia, & Gorno-Tempini, 2012). …”

Particularités du variant logopénique au sein des aphasies progressives primaires

“…Ce terme est choisi devant la pauvreté de la production verbale mais une relative pré servation des compé tences grammaticales, des é lé ments moteurs de la production de la parole et de la mé moire sé mantique permettant de le distinguer des 2 autres variants d'APP [35][36][37].…”