Background: This study investigates the role of lexical information in normal and aphasic sentence comprehension. Effects of verb biases in normal comprehension have been well documented in previous studies (e.g., Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993), but their role in aphasic language processing has largely been ignored (with the exceptions of Menn et al., 1998,...

Alzheimer’s disease is the cause of up to one third of cases of primary progressive aphasia or corticobasal syndrome. The objective of this study was to determine the accuracy of FDG-PET metabolic imaging for detection of Alzheimer’s disease in patients with primary progressive aphasia or corticobasal syndrome. Methods: A cohort of subjects (n = 94) including those with expert clinical diagnosi...

Neurology 2010;75:582–583 When a patient presents with acute aphasia, today’s neurologist takes swift action to characterize the clinical syndrome and use neuroimaging and other tools to identify its pathophysiologic basis. One goal of these urgent efforts is to determine whether the patient has an ischemic process that merits thrombolytic intervention. We can only hope that tomorrow’s neurolog...

BACKGROUND: Classical aphasiology, based on the study of stroke sequelae, fuses speech fluency and grammatical ability. Nonfluent (Broca's) aphasia often is accompanied by agrammatism; whereas in the fluent aphasias grammatical deficits are not typical. The assumption that a similar relationship exists in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) has led to the dichotomization of this syndrome into flu...