BACKGROUND A proportion of patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). It is currently unknown whether the behavioural and cognitive syndrome in bvFTD with ALS (ALS-FTD) is indistinguishable from that of bvFTD alone. METHODS A retrospective cohort of 241 patients with clinical diagnoses of bvFTD (n=185) or ALS-FTD (n=56) was e...

Complex sentence processing is supported by a left-lateralized neural network including inferior frontal cortex and posterior superior temporal cortex. This study investigates the pattern of connectivity and information flow within this network. We used fMRI BOLD data derived from 12 healthy participants reported in an earlier study (Thompson, C. K., Den Ouden, D. B., Bonakdarpour, B., Garibald...

In interpreting a sentence, listeners rely on a variety of linguistic cues to assign grammatical roles such as agent and patient. The present study considered the relative ranking of three cues to agenthood (word order, noun animacy, and subject-verb agreement) in normal and aphasic speakers of Hindi. Because animacy plays a grammatical role in Hindi (determining the nature and acceptability of...

This study explored lexical-syntactic information - syntactic information that is stored in the lexicon - and its relation to syntactic and lexical impairments in aphasia. We focused on two types of lexical-syntactic information: predicate argument structure (PAS) of verbs (the number and types of arguments the verb selects) and grammatical gender of nouns. The participants were 17 Hebrew-speak...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to compare the outcomes of the manually coded Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis (NNLA) system, which was developed for characterizing agrammatic production patterns, and the automated Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) system, which has recently been adopted to analyze speech samples of individuals with aphasia (a) for reliability purposes to ascer...

The present study is an examination of an Italian aphasic speaker (M.R.) with non-fluent speech following a focal lesion in the left hemisphere. We develop an explanation of M.R.'s language impairment compatible with theories of generative syntax and with some observations on parsing strategies. The explanatory framework we adopt considers the grammar to be an integral part of on-line language ...

Sir, In their Letter to the Editor, Pedro Braga-Neto et al. (2015) emphasized the cerebellum’s major role in cognition and behaviour. The letter echoes our recent description of cerebellar impairments in patients with spinocerebellar ataxia type 21 (SCA21) caused by TMEM240 gene mutations (Delplanque et al., 2014). The affected patients’ cognitive and neurobehavioural features clearly correspon...

One of a series of reports on the status of speech investigation, this collection of articles deals with topics including intonation and morphological knowledge. The titles of the articles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Integration and Segregation in Speech Perception" (Bruno H. Repp); (2) "Speech Perception Takes Precedence over Nonspeech Perception" (D. H. Whalen and Alvin M. Liberman...

INTRODUCTION Neuroimaging and lesion studies indicate a left hemisphere network for verb and verb argument structure processing, involving both frontal and temporoparietal brain regions. Although their verb comprehension is generally unimpaired, it is well known that individuals with agrammatic aphasia often present with verb production deficits, characterized by an argument structure complexit...

ion, 470Accumulator model, 285–289, 310,311Action meanings, cognitive model ofgrasping, 274, 275Agrammatism, 168–169Alarm call, 425Amusics, congenital, 437–438Analog magnitude representations ofnumbers, 308–312Analysis-by-synthesis model, 151–154Aristotle, 505–509Arithmetic reasoning principles, 283–284Articulatory mechanism and ‘‘arti...