Action fluency identifies different sex,age, global cognition,executive function and brain activation profile in non-demented patients with Parkinson’s disease

Journal of Neurology - Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have difficulties processing action words, which could be related to early cognitive decline. The action fluency test can be used...     

Conception or *conceivation? The processing of derivational morphology in semantic dementia

Background: Only a few studies have focused on derivational morphology in semantic dementia (SD). The productive and componential nature of derivational morphology as well as recent findings in psycholinguistics suggest that semantic cognition would be involved in the production and comprehension of derivational morphemes and derived words. Therefore, participants with SD might present impairment in derivational morphology.

Aims: This study aims to specify semantic cognition’s involvement in the production and comprehension of derivational morphemes and morphologically complex words in SD participants. This involvement was considered in relation to the production of morphologically complex words, the comprehension of the meaning conveyed by morphemes, and the capacity to distinguish between words with a real vs. an apparent morphological structure.

Methods and Procedures: Ten French-speaking SD participants completed three tasks of derivational morphology. Their performances were compared to those of a group of 20 age-, gender- and education-matched adults without cognitive impairment.

Outcomes and Results: Compared with participants of the control group, SD participants had more difficulty producing nouns derived from verbs that follow less-frequent patterns of root allomorphy, while their performance was less affected when they could rely on basic morphological decomposition/composition abilities. Participants with SD also had more difficulties to match derived words and pseudo-words to a definition and to distinguish between pairs of real morphological antonyms and pseudo-morphological non-antonyms.

Conclusions: These results support the involvement of semantic cognition in the validation of morpheme combinations and in derivational morpheme representation. Difficulties in the production and comprehension of derived words and derivational morphemes are another of the many consequences of central semantic impairment that characterises SD. More studies are needed to develop tests and further characterise the involvement of semantic cognition in derivational morphology.     

Production of morphologically derived words in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia: preserved decomposition and composition but impaired validation

Abstract

Although there is growing interest in inflectional morphology in semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), derivational morphology has rarely been studied in this population. This study reports the performance of N.G., a 72-year-old-woman with svPPA in a verb production task designed to entail morphological processing (composition, decomposition) and self-appraisal of her productions. N.G. demonstrated an over-reliance on morphological processing and failures in her appraisal of root/affix combinations that resulted in the production of morphological paraphasias and neologisms. Her performance in lexical decision of verbs and pseudo-verbs points to the involvement of semantic impairment in these difficulties.     

Improving verb anomia in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia: the effectiveness of a semantic-phonological cueing treatment

The semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) is known to affect the comprehension and production of all content words, including verbs. However, studies of the treatment of anomia in this disorder focused on relearning object names only. This study reports treatment of verb anomia in an individual with svPPA. The semantic-phonological cueing therapy resulted in significant improvement in naming abilities, for treated verbs only. This case study demonstrates that improvement in verb-naming abilities may be possible in svPPA. The almost complete maintenance of the treatment’s effects in the patient 4 weeks after the end of the therapy also suggests improvements may be durable, at least in the short term, for some individuals with svPPA.