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Morphosyntactic comprehension in primary progressive aphasia: evidence from Spanish

Poster A46 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall

Simona Mancini¹, Marco Calabria², Francesco Ciongoli², Clara Martin¹, Sonia Marques-Kiderle³, Alberto Lleo³, Ignacio Illán-Gala³, Miguel Ángel Santos Santos³; ¹BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language, ²Cognitive NeuroLab, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, ³Sant Pau Memory Unit, Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques Sant Pau – Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

The clinical diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) relies on the identification of neurodegenerative impairment with predominant language features. Further classification into one of three variants -semantic (svPPA), logopenic (lvPPA) and nonfluent (nfvPPA) – is based on patterns of relative preservation and impairment in the language domain, as described in Gorno-Tempini et al. (2011). Agrammatism, a heterogeneous constellation of morphosyntactic deficits in production and comprehension, is typically associated with the nfvPPA. Yet, evidence has been accumulating concerning the presence of morphosyntactic impairment in fluent variants, i.e., svPPA and lvPPA (see Auclair-Ouellet et al. 2015 for a review). The goal of this study was to investigate whether and how impairment in the comprehension of morphosyntactic information extends to fluent variants, by capitalizing on the rich morphological system of Spanish. Twenty-eight native speakers of Spanish diagnosed with PPA [9 nfvPPA, 12 lvPPA and 5 svPPA], and 16 age- and sex-matched control participants participated in the study so far. Classification in one of the three variants followed guidelines in Gorno-Tempini et al. (2011) and was supported by neuroimaging and neuropsychological assessment. Participants were visually and aurally presented with 48 sentences (50% incorrect) on a computer and were instructed to evaluate the acceptability of each stimulus. Unacceptable sentences contained different types of morphosyntactic anomalies [e.g., agreement: *Las botellas(pl) está(sg) en la nevera/*The bottles is in the fridge; word order: *Tomamos un café la en terraza del bar/*We had coffee the in bar terrace; verb-argument structure anomalies: *Pinté al mueble nuevo/*I painted to the new piece of furniture]. Analysis of accuracy and response times showed that participants in the three PPA variants were less accurate and slower at evaluating the acceptability of sentences compared to the control group [ACCURACY (%): control – mean: 0.96 (standard error: 0.01); nfvPPA- mean 0.89 (se: 0.03); svPPA: 0.83 (se: 0.06); lvPPA: 0.86 (se: 0.04); RESPONSE TIMES (sec): control: 5.54 (se: 0.82); nfvPPA: 7.16 (se: 0.99); svPPA: 9.16 (se: 1.39); lvPPA: Mean 8.28 (se: 0.91)]. nfvPPA, svPPA and lvPPA groups performed similarly on this task. This set of data show that fluent, as well as non-fluent variants of PPA can show morphosyntactic impairment and suggest that this type of deficit may not be as strong a predictor of the non-fluent PPA variant as once thought. The analysis of a larger sample, together with the inclusion of additional comprehension (sentence-picture matching) and production tasks (sentence elicitation and connected speech) will further elucidate the degree of impairment in this linguistic domain across the three PPA variants. REFERENCES: Auclair-Ouellet, N. (2015). Inflectional morphology in primary progressive aphasia and Alzheimer’s disease: a systematic review. Journal of Neurolinguistics. Gorno-Tempini et. Al. (2011). Classification of primary progressive aphasia and its variants. Neurology.

Topic Areas: Disorders: Acquired, Syntax