Neural correlates of grammatical impairment in primary progressive aphasia

Europa, Eduardo and Mack, Jennifer and Weintraub, Sandra and Mesulam, M. Marsel and Thompson, Cynthia (2014) Neural correlates of grammatical impairment in primary progressive aphasia. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is characterized by distinct patterns of left-lateralized neural degeneration and declining language functioning. Although deficits in grammatical processing (e.g., complex sentence production and comprehension, production of grammatical morphology) are primarily seen in the agrammatic variant (PPA-G), subtle impairments also may be observed in the logopenic (PPA-L) and semantic (PPA-S) variants (see Wilson, et al., 2012; Thompson & Mack, in press, for a review). In cognitively healthy individuals, production and comprehension of syntactically complex structures involves both the left middle temporal cortex (Ben-Shalom & Poeppel, 2008; Indefrey & Levelt, 2004) and the left inferior frontal and motor cortices (Friederici, 2002; Kielar et al., 2011; Shapiro, et al., 2012; Tyler et al., 2005), with similar regions engaged for production of grammatical morphology. However, impaired complex sentence production and comprehension in PPA has been linked primarily to atrophy in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Amici et al., 2007; Rogalski et al., 2011; Wilson et al., 2011) and atrophy patterns associated with deficits in grammatical morphology have not been previously studied. The present study aimed to identify the cortical areas of atrophy associated with deficits in complex sentence production, complex sentence comprehension, and production of grammatical morphology in PPA. Identification of these patterns has relevance for understanding the neural mechanisms of grammatical processing and as well as for clinical management of individuals with PPA.

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