Event Abstract

Back to Event

Language and memory features of autobiographical narratives of svPPA patients

Bruna Seixas Lima1, 2*, Brian Levine3, 4, Naida Graham1, 2, Carol Leonard1, 5, David Tang-Wai6, Sandra E. Black7, 8, 9 and Elizabeth Rochon1, 2
  • 1 University of Toronto, Rehabilitation Sciences Institute, Canada
  • 2 Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, University Health Network, Canada
  • 3 University of Toronto, Psychology, Canada
  • 4 Baycrest Hospital, Rotman Research Institute, Canada
  • 5 University of Ottawa, Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Program, Canada
  • 6 University Health Network, Department of Medicine, Canada
  • 7 Sunnybrook Health Science Centre, L.C. Campbell Cognitive Neurology Research Unit, Canada
  • 8 University of Toronto, Institute of Medical Science, Canada
  • 9 Heart And Stroke Foundation, Canada

Semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) is a neurodegenerative condition whose most prominent symptom is linguistic disruption characterized by anomia and poor comprehension of single words (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011). Semantic memory disruption is a key feature of svPPA (Snowden, Goulding & Neary, 1989; Hodges & Patterson, 2007). Autobiographical memory is the term used to refer to memory of our life events. Within autobiographical memory recall, a distinction can be made between two subsystems: episodic memory (memory details linked to a specific time and place) and semantic memory (general knowledge about the world and ourselves), (Levine, 2002). Studies investigating autobiographical recall have found svPPA patients show impairments recalling remote episodic information (e.g. McKinnon et al., 2006; Irish et al., 2011). These studies tend to focus on the amount of detail participants are able to recall, but the quality of the propositional content is not usually considered. A previous study from our lab (Seixas Lima et al., manuscript in preparation) focused on investigating memory and language during autobiographical recall. Discourse samples were collected from svPPA patients and controls. The Autobiographical Interview (AI) (Levine et al., 2002) was used as a means of tallying the number of episodic and semantic memory details produced, and a rating scale was developed to investigate discourse coherence. As previously observed in the literature (McKinnon et al., 2006; Irish et al., 2011), svPPA patients produced fewer episodic details, while producing a comparable number of semantic details to controls. However, analysis of coherence showed that patients received a lower coherence score in semantic details, while receiving a comparable coherence score to controls in episodic details. This demonstrates that coherence analysis was able to uncover a new feature of autobiographical recall in svPPA patients (i.e. difficulty maintaining coherence of semantic information). To further explore these findings, we investigated other combinations of memory and language measures in svPPA patients. The same set of discourse samples was analyzed to investigate how semantic memory impairments affect lower level language features (e.g. quantity of lexical items and extent of sentence elaboration). For this, we used an adaptation of the Quantitative Production Analysis (Rochon et al., 2000). Additionally, we investigated the number of verbs produced in different tenses in order to expand previous findings about verb tense production in svPPA (Irish et al., 2016). The discourse of seven svPPA patients and seven controls was analyzed. Results using independent samples Mann-Whitney U tests demonstrated that the analysis of the narrative as a whole did not show quantitative differences in discourse production between svPPA patients and controls. However, the investigation of sets of memory details (i.e. episodic and semantic information separately) showed that svPPA patients produced fewer nouns (p=.05) and fewer verbs in the infinitive form (p<.05) than controls in the semantic set of details, but not in the set of episodic details. These results suggest that the combination of memory and linguistic features may reveal different aspects of autobiographical recall.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant numbers 82744 and 130462).

References

Gorno-Tempini, M. L., Hillis, A. E., Weintraub, S., Kertesz, A., Mendez, M., Cappa, S. E. E. A., ... & Manes, F. (2011). Classification of primary progressive aphasia and its variants. Neurology, 76(11), 1006-1014.

Hodges, J. R., & Patterson, K. (2007). Semantic dementia: a unique clinicopathological syndrome. The Lancet Neurology, 6(11), 1004-1014.

Irish, M., Hornberger, M., Lah, S., Miller, L., Pengas, G., Nestor, P. J., ... & Piguet, O. (2011). Profiles of recent autobiographical memory retrieval in semantic dementia, behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia, and Alzheimer's disease. Neuropsychologia, 49(9), 2694-2702.

Irish, M., Kamminga, J., Addis, D. R., Crain, S., Thornton, R., Hodges, J. R., & Piguet, O. (2016). ‘Language of the past’–Exploring past tense disruption during autobiographical narration in neurodegenerative disorders. Journal of Neuropsychology, 10(2), 215-316.

Levine, B., Svoboda, E., Hay, J. F., Winocur, G., & Moscovitch, M. (2002). Aging and autobiographical memory: dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval. Psychology and aging, 17(4), 677.

McKinnon, M. C., Black, S. E., Miller, B., Moscovitch, M., & Levine, B. (2006). Autobiographical memory in semantic dementia: implications for theories of limbic-neocortical interaction in remote memory. Neuropsychologia, 44(12), 2421-2429.

Rochon, E., Saffran, E. M., Berndt, R. S., & Schwartz, M. F. (2000). Quantitative analysis of aphasic sentence production: Further development and new data. Brain and language, 72(3), 193-218.

Seixas Lima, B., Graham, NL., Leonard, C., Levine, B., Black, SE., Tang Wai, DF., Freedman, B., Rochon, E. (manuscript in preparation) Semantic memory impairment and global coherence of discourse.

Snowden, J. S., Goulding, P. J., & Neary, D. (1989). Semantic dementia: A form of circumscribed cerebral atrophy. Behavioural Neurology.

Keywords: discourse, autobiographical memory, svppa, Language, Dementia, Semantic memory

Conference: Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada, 21 Oct - 23 Oct, 2018.

Presentation Type: poster presentation

Topic: Eligible for a student award

Citation: Seixas Lima B, Levine B, Graham N, Leonard C, Tang-Wai D, Black SE and Rochon E (2019). Language and memory features of autobiographical narratives of svPPA patients. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.228.00070

Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.

The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.

Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.

For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.

Received: 30 Apr 2018; Published Online: 22 Jan 2019.

* Correspondence: Mrs. Bruna Seixas Lima, University of Toronto, Rehabilitation Sciences Institute, Toronto, Canada, bruna.seixas.lima@gmail.com