PubMed · 10716860
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E B Zurif. 2000. Syntactic and semantic composition.. https://doi.org/10.1006/brln.1999.2265
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Ten autopsied patients from a prospectively followed, clinically defined, neuropsychologically and radiologically documented cohort with primary progressive aphasia were histologically characterized. All were variants of frontotemporal degeneration (Pick complex): Pick body dementia, n=3, corticobasals degeneration (CBD), n=4, and tau and synuclein negative ubiquitinated inclusions of the motor neuron disease type, n=3. All shared superficial cortical spongiosis, neuronal loss, and gliosis. Although most patients had fluent anomic aphasia at onset, all progressed to a nonfluent or mute state. Comprehension, episodic memory, and activities of daily living were initially preserved. Three cases with Pick body dementia had verbal apraxia and stuttering at onset. Two of the patients with CBD pathology were older than the average primary progressive aphasia (PPA). All patients developed secondary syndromes either of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and/or extrapyramidal-apraxic manifestations (CBD). By the time autopsy was obtained, the pathology appeared outside the language areas. Progressive aphasias secondary to Alzheimer's disease (AD) were excluded on the basis of early loss of memory and comprehension.Rather than the previously emphasized histological heterogeneity, clinically probable PPA has a predictive value of a group of related pathologies, collectively named frontotemporal degeneration, or Pick complex. This series of autopsied cases provides evidence for the clinical and pathological overlap of PPA with FTD and CBD, and contributes to the diagnostic and neuropsychological definition of PPA.
We report the case study of a severe fluent aphasic patient, who showed relatively preserved numerical abilities. A detailed investigation of number processing indicated good numerical comprehension and a relative sparing of addition and subtraction abilities; on the other hand, multiplication and division were severely impaired. A further study of multi-digit operations showed that the patient's performance was characterized by a selective impairment of the borrowing procedure, in which she applied the so-called Smaller-from-Larger bug, typically observed in children learning to calculate. The present case provides further evidence for the dissociation between operations based on verbal sequences and on quantity manipulation, respectively impaired and preserved in patients with severe aphasia. Moreover, it provides evidence indicating that procedures may be dissociated from conceptual knowledge within a single arithmetical operation.
One of the important issues in event-related brain potential research is whether the language-related P600 and the P300 oddball effect are distinct components or not. We addressed this question by testing 14 aphasic patients, half of them with lesions including the basal ganglia and half of them with temporo-parietal lesions, in both an auditory oddball task and an experiment with auditory presented verb inflection violations. Whereas both patient groups displayed a clear P300 effect in the oddball experiment, only the group with temporo-parietal lesions showed a P600 in the language experiment. These data indicate that the basal ganglia seem to play a crucial role in the modulation of the P600, but not of the P300 component.