Behavioral assessment of speech perception and language comprehension in primary progressive aphasia

EasyChair Preprint no. 6288

Abstract

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive loss of speech and language (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011). Speech perception and language comprehension deficits are manifest in PPA, but relatively understudied. Recent work indicates deficits at sublexical (Hardy et al., 2017), lexical, and semantic levels (Vonk et al., 2019); however, few studies have systematically investigated levels of processing within the same PPA cohort. In this study, participants with logopenic (lvPPA, n = 18), semantic (svPPA, n = 13) and nonfluent (nfvPPA, n = 10) PPA and age-matched controls (n = 11) completed three constrained tasks designed to assess receptive speech and language processing at sublexical, lexical-phonological, lexical-semantic, and semantic levels (Dial and Martin, 2017). Tasks included: syllable discrimination (SylDisc, sublexical) and auditory lexical decision (AudLexDec, lexical) with phonological distractors, and single picture-word matching (PWM, lexical-phonological, lexical-semantic, semantic) with phonological, taxonomic, and associated distractors. Phonological distractors differed by a single phonemic feature. Individuals with lvPPA had impaired performance on SylDisc, AudLexDec, and PWM, whereas individuals with svPPA and nfvPPA had impaired performance on AudLexDec and PWM. An examination of the types of errors made on AudLexDec and PWM provided further insight into level(s) of deficits. Overall, the results indicate deficits in receptive processing at the: sublexical level in lvPPA; lexical-phonological level in all variants; and lexical-semantic and semantic levels in lvPPA and svPPA. This study provides a more precise characterization of the linguistic profile of each PPA subtype. The unique constellation of deficits observed in each PPA subtype holds promise for differential diagnosis and for informing models of intervention.

Keyphrases: language comprehension, lexical decision, logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia, nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia, picture-word matching, primary progressive aphasia, semantic variant Primary progressive aphasia, speech perception, syllable discrimination

@Booklet{EasyChair:6288,
  author = {Heather Dial and Rachel Tessmer and Maya Henry},
  title = {Behavioral assessment of speech perception and language comprehension in primary progressive aphasia},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6288},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}