The speech of individuals with agrammatism is generally characterized by omission or substitution of grammatical morphemes, a high noun-to-verb ratio and a lack of complex sentence structures. It is generally agreed upon that agrammatic speakers show a highly selective pattern of impairment of functional categories (Arabatzi & Edwards 2000, 2002; Bastiaanse 1995; Bastiaanse & Thompson 2003; Fri...

We present a review of the literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) together with the analysis of neuropschychological and neuroradiologic profiles of 42 PPA patients. Mesulam originally defined PPA as a progressive degenerative disorder characterized by isolated language impairment for at least two years. The most common variants of PPA are: 1) Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), 2) s...

In a number of papers we have been concerned with the type of inferences that are legitimate in "experiments of nature" where the experimenter does not and cannot control the modifications to the cognitive system that are introduced by brain damage. We have argued that in such cases very restrictive conditions must be met in order to be able to draw valid inferences about the structure of norma...

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 Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is one of the clinical syndromes frontotemporal dementia (1). The frequency PPA low (16%) in this Latin America, with just published report Peruvian population (2). We aim to describe features patients followed up at a Neurological healthcare center Peru. Method Retrospective review records diagnosed probable (based on 2011 diagnostic criteria) durin...

Normals display selective deficits in morphology and syntax under adverse processing conditions. Digit loads do not impair processing of passives and object relatives, but do impair processing of grammatical morphemes. Perceptual degradation and temporal compression selectively impair several aspects of grammar, including passives and object relatives. Hence we replicate CW’s specific findings ...

A French-speaking patient with Broca's aphasia--following a left-hemisphere lesion involving the sylvian region but sparing Broca's area--is presented. Like G. Miceli, A. Mazzuchi, L. Menn, and H. Goodglass's (1983, Brain and Language, 19, 65-97) case 2, this patient produces agrammatic speech in the absence of any comprehension deficit. Unlike Miceli's patient, though, agrammatic speech can be...

This study investigated whether a Dutch and adapted version of Reduced Syntax Therapy (REST) could stimulate and automatise the production of ellipses in Dutch-speaking, chronically agrammatic speakers (N = 12). Ellipses are syntactic frames in which slots for grammatical morphology tend to be lacking (e.g., everybody inside). When elliptical style is applied on a regular basis, the linguistic ...

Functional brain imaging studies have improved our knowledge of the neural localization of language functions and the functional reorganization after a lesion. However, the neural correlates of agrammatic symptoms in aphasia remain largely unknown. The present fMRI study examined the neural correlates of morpho-syntactic encoding and agrammatic errors in continuous language production by combin...