: http://si p://pubs.as In recent years there has been an increase in research describing the behavioral characteristics and underlying pathology of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). One of the earliest and most prominent features of PPA, particularly for the logopenic and semantic variants, is anomia, and this is often the symptom that prompts individuals with PPA to seek treatment. However, ...

The non-fluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA) and the behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) are focal neurodegenerative disorders belonging to the FTD-spectrum clinical syndromes. NfvPPA is characterized by effortful speech and/or agrammatism and left frontal atrophy, while bvFTD is characterized by social-emotional dysfunction often accompanied by right...

Hair-splitting details of syndromic classification can hardly be expected to generate much excitement. As in all areas of science, however, sound nosology and uniform nomenclature are important for progress in neurology. This is particularly true for the neurodegenerative syndromes, including primary progressive aphasia (PPA), where heterogeneity of phenotype and cellular pathology has defied a...

Although we define textual cohesion as a pragmatic characteristic, its dependence on grammar is obvious. Ángel Herrero defines it as follows: "A set of linguistic mechanisms used by a text to ensure the explicit cohesion of its parts. Cohesion enables the linguistic interpretation of an element in the text (a morpheme, a word, a construction) to take place thanks to other elements in the same t...

The clinical picture of juvenile amaurotic idiocy was originally described in Norway by Stengel in 1826. He observed four siblings with normal development up to the age of 6 years when amaurosis and subsequent mental disorders developed. From the age of 14 years convulsive seizures were noted. The disease ran a progressive course and the patients died at the age of about 20 years. Vogt in Germa...

Grodzinsky examines Broca’s aphasia in terms of some specific grammatical deficits. However, his grammatical models offer no way to characterize the distinctions he observes. Rather than grammatical deficits, his patients seem to have intact grammars but defective modules of parsing and production. It is a fact about natural languages that words and phrases may be pronounced in displaced positi...

Aphasia is a communication impairment that results from injury or damage to the left side of brain. It may occur after stroke, brain injury, other neurologic condition. refers loss language abilities. can result in difficulty speaking, listening, reading, writing. Many individuals also have repeating things spoken them, although some people with aphasia completely mimic utterances, leading thos...

The title of Cottrell's book mentions only two concepts: connectionism and lexical disambiguation. That's misleading, because the book has much more to offer than just that. Among the topics addressed are parsing, agrammatism, connectionist inheritance hierarchies, and structural ambiguity, and it is the integration of this wide-ranging set of topics that is one of the strengths of the work. Th...

There is no doubt that listening to or reading sentences activates the left frontal lobe structures in and around Brocaʼs area. The question is, what process(es) does this activation reflect? In our recent critical review of this literature (Rogalsky & Hickok, 2011) we questioned whether any of this activation reflects processes that are specific to receptive sentence processing. Specifically, ...

Paraphrasing the context from Sir William Gowers, Dr Alajouanine (Fig. 1) declares his subject as lying within the ‘borderlands of aphasia’—specifically the effects of aphasia on three individuals, known to him professionally, each having considerable pre-morbid artistic ability in writing, music or painting, respectively. He considers whether comparisons of their work before and after the onse...