CONTEXT Patients with primary progressive aphasia have sentence comprehension difficulty, but the longitudinal course of this deficit has not been investigated. OBJECTIVE To determine how grammatical, single word meaning, and working memory factors contribute to longitudinal decline of sentence comprehension in primary progressive aphasia. We hypothesised partially distinct patterns of senten...

Degeneration of language regions in the dominant hemisphere can result in primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a clinical syndrome characterized by progressive deficits in speech and/or language function. Recent studies have identified three variants of PPA: progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA), semantic dementia (SD) and logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). Each variant is associated with chara...

Studies of real-time processing in aphasia suggest that linguistic symptoms may be due to deficits in activation dynamics rather than loss of linguistic knowledge. To investigate the domain specificity of such processing deficits, we compared performance by Italian-speaking fluent aphasics, nonfluent aphasics, and normal controls in a linguistic priming task (grammatical gender) with their perf...

The neuropsychological features of the primary progressive aphasia (PPA) syndromes continue to be defined. Here we describe a detailed neuropsychological case study of a patient with a mutation in the progranulin (GRN) gene who presented with progressive word-finding difficulty. Key neuropsychological features in this case included gravely impoverished propositional speech with anomia and prolo...

Patients with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) appear to have impaired number knowledge. We examined the nature of their number deficit while we tested the hypothesis that comprehension of larger numbers depends in part on verbal mediation. We evaluated magnitude judgments and performance on number conservation measures rooted in Piagetian theory in nonaphasic patients with CBD (n=13) and patien...

Background: Conversation is central to building and maintaining relationships. Thus, it unsurprising that people with aphasia their familiar conversation partners often desire improved conversational ability. However, facilitate real-world communication, focusing on improving aphasic language difficulties not enough. We also need a comprehensive understanding of how social actions are accomplis...