Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a neurocognitive disorder ascribed to cortical atrophy impacting language abilities. It is widely classified into three main variants, logopenic PPA (lvPPA), the semantic variant of PPA (svPPA), and the non-fluent PPA (nfvPPA), showing different impairment patterns across variants. However, in the early phases of PPA, it is not always easy to dissociate different PPA variants and distinguish PPA from other neurodegenerative disorders. One characteristic language symptom that seems to be a distinguishing factor of PPA, especially the logopenic variant, is impaired sentence repetition. Nonetheless, studies examining sentence repetition in PPA, and Alzheimer's disease (AD) more broadly, have resulted in mixed findings. To better understand the working memory-intensive nature of sentence repetition deficits, we designed a sentence repetition span task. We seek to understand (i) whether three diagnostic groups (lvPPA, svPPA, and AD) encounter greater sentence repetition difficulties than the controls, and (ii) whether using a span task design, in which the number of content words increases as the span length increases, would help dissociate PPA variants from AD type dementia. In this study, we administered a sentence repetition span task to four groups of French-speaking individuals with lvPPA (n = 14), svPPA (n = 5), and with AD (n = 13), and their age-matched healthy controls (n = 61). The results showed that all three diagnostic groups (lvPPA, svPPA, and AD) performed equally poorly compared to the controls on the repetition span task virtually in all measures (i.e., sentence span, the number of content words, and the number of omission and substitution errors). One intriguing finding was that the lvPPA group produced an exalted number of phonological errors during repeating sentences, while this type of error was somewhat moderate in the svPPA group and only minimal in the AD group. We conclude that the sentence repetition difficulty in PPA and AD should be modulated by working memory capacity, as our participants undoubtedly demonstrated greater difficulty as the span length increased. However, we note that working memory-intensive sentence repetition deficits based on the number of content words might not reveal critical diagnostic differences between the neurodegenerative groups.
Introduction: Especially in the chronic phase, individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) (IwTBI) may still have impairments at the discourse level, even if these remain undetected by conventional aphasia tests. As a consequence, IwTBI may be impaired in conversational behavior and disadvantaged in their socio-communicative participation. Even though handling discourse is thought to be a basic requirement for participation and quality of life, only a handful of test procedures assessing discourse disorders have been developed so far. The MAKRO Screening is a recently developed screening tool designed to assess discourse impairments. The test construction is based on psycholinguistic frameworks and the concept of macro-rules, which refer to cognitive functions responsible for organizing and reducing complex information (e.g., propositional content) in discourse.
Aim: The aim of our study was to investigate discourse processing in IwTBI in different tasks and to assess problems in communicative participation in the post-acute and chronic phase. In this context, we also aimed to analyze the influence of the severity of the initial impairment and the verbal executive abilities on the discourse performance. Additionally, the impact of macrolinguistic discourse impairments and verbal fluency on perceived communicative participation was targeted in our analysis.
Methods: Data from 23 IwTBI (moderate to severe) and 23 healthy control subjects have been analyzed. They completed two subtests of the MAKRO screening: Text production and Inferences. Discourse performance was examined in relation to measures of semantic fluency and verbal task-switching. Socio-communicative problems were evaluated with the German version of the La Trobe Communication Questionnaire (LCQ).
Results: IwTBI showed lower test results than the control group in the two subtests of the MAKRO-Screening. Difficulties in picture-based narrative text production also indicated greater perceived difficulties in communicative participation (LCQ). We also found that the subject’s performance on the MAKRO-Screening subtests can partly be explained by underlying dysexecutive symptoms (in terms of verbal fluency and verbal task switching) and the severity of their injury. The preliminary results of our study show that cognitive-linguistic symptoms in IwTBI are also evident in the chronic phase. These can be detected with procedures referring to the discourse level, such as the MAKRO-Screening. The assessment of discourse performance should be an integral part in the rehabilitation of IwTBI in order to detect cognitive-linguistic communication disorders and to evaluate their impact on socio-communicative participation.
Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a degenerative condition characterized by the progressive loss of language function. In PPA, aphasia is the most prominent deficit at onset. On the other hand, memory deficits are the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The first aim of the study was to establish differences on neuropsychological testing and connected speech production between Greek-speaking individuals with AD and PPA. The second aim was to investigate the executive deficit involvement in the two conditions. Ten individuals with PPA and 9 individuals with AD took part in a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic evaluation. Fifteen demographically matched neurologically healthy adults served as controls. Participants were evaluated using a battery of neuropsychological measures. Quantitative production analysis and acoustic analysis were performed to calculate narrative and temporal measures of the participants' speech. Participants with PPA differed significantly from participants with AD on linguistic measures. They performed worse on the long frequent sentences' subtest of the Sentence Repetition Test and they produced fewer narrative and unique words in picture description. They also produced shorter, less elaborated sentences, and made more phonological errors. The two groups did not differ significantly on memory, executive, visuospatial and semantic composite measures. Compared to neurotypical adults, participants with AD were impaired in memory, and executive function. They also exhibited lexical retrieval difficulties, as well as difficulties in linguistic tasks with an increased processing load. Participants with PPA performed within normal limits on the delay conditions of episodic memory measures. However, they too were impaired in executive tasks, especially for short-term memory and verbal fluency. The production of phonological errors, difficulty in repeating long frequent sentences, and the production of simple and short sentences has differentiated participants PPA not only from neurotypical controls but also from participants with AD. No single measure could differentiate the AD group from the other two groups. These findings should be interpreted with caution considering the small sample size.
Sentence comprehension involves maintaining and continuously integrating linguistic information and, thus, makes demands on working memory (WM). Past research has demonstrated that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, is critical for integrating word meanings across some distance and resolving semantic interference in sentence comprehension. Here, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of center-embedded relative clause sentences, often argued to make heavy demands on WM. Additionally, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of transitive and dative active and passive sentences, which may also draw on WM resources depending on the number of propositions that must be maintained and the difficulty of processing passive clauses. In a large sample of individuals with aphasia (N = 56), we assessed whether comprehension performance on more complex vs. simpler active-passive or embedded relative clause sentences would be predicted by semantic but not phonological WM when controlling for single word comprehension. For performance on the active-passive comprehension task, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of dative sentences when controlling for comprehension of transitive sentences. We also found that phonological WM, but not semantic WM, predicted mean comprehension for reversible active-passive sentences when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. On the relative clause comprehension task, consistent with prior results, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of object relative clause sentences and relative clause sentences with a passive construction. However, both phonological WM and semantic WM predicted mean comprehension across all relative clause types for reversible trials when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. While we found evidence of semantic WM’s role in comprehension, we also observed unpredicted relations between phonological WM and comprehension in some conditions. Post-hoc analyses provided preliminary evidence that phonological WM maintains a backup phonological representation of the sentence that may be accessed when sentence comprehension processing is less efficient. Future work should investigate possible roles that phonological WM may play across sentence types.