Linguistic Aspects of Primary Progressive Aphasia

Posted: 13 Feb 2018

See all articles by Murray Grossman

Murray Grossman

University of Pennsylvania - Department of Neurology

Date Written: January 2018

Abstract

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) refers to a disorder of declining language associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal degeneration and Alzheimer disease. Variants of PPA are important to recognize from a medical perspective because these syndromes are clinical markers suggesting specific underlying pathology. In this review, I discuss linguistic aspects of PPA syndromes that may prove informative for parsing our language mechanism and identifying the neural representation of fundamental elements of language. I focus on the representation of word meaning in a discussion of semantic variant PPA, grammatical comprehension and expression in a discussion of nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA, the supporting role of short-term memory in a discussion of logopenic variant PPA, and components of language associated with discourse in a discussion of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. PPA provides a novel perspective that uniquely addresses facets of language and its disorders while complementing traditional aphasia syndromes that follow stroke.

Suggested Citation

Grossman, Murray, Linguistic Aspects of Primary Progressive Aphasia (January 2018). Annual Review of Linguistics, Vol. 4, Issue 1, pp. 377-403, 2018, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3121059 or http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011516-034253

Murray Grossman (Contact Author)

University of Pennsylvania - Department of Neurology

Philadelphia, PA 19104
United States

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