Another side of the coin: Primary progressive aphasia in Chinese language

Abstract

Background: Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome that presents with speech and language impairments and is generally classified into three variants: semantic (svPPA), nonfluent/ agrammatic (nfvPPA), and logopenic variants (lvPPA). Current understanding of PPA has been mostly derived from English language patients. Expanding PPA research into non-English languages encourages language-specific linguistic-adapted assessments and enriches our knowledge in linguistic features distinct from English language. This presentation focuses on three Chinese linguistic features that differ from English language: lexical tones, classifier, and logographic script. Chinese is a tonal and classifier language in which tones are lexically contrastive, and classifiers are obligatory to quantify nouns numerally. It also adopts logographic script that has complex visuospatial configurations and weak graphemephoneme correspondence. Method:The CLAP (Chinese LanguageAssessment for PPA) battery is designed to characterize the neurolinguistics features of Chinese speaking PPA individuals. In CLAP classifier task, participants are asked to spontaneously produce classifiers specific to numerous nouns and presented with multiple choices when failed. To evaluate Chinese writing skills, participants are tasked with dictating 60 Chinese characters of varying lexicality, character frequency, and stroke number. The motor speech function is assessed by multiple repetitions of Chinese characters that differ in articulation places, manners, and tones. Results:The CLAP project enrolled 20 controls and 33 PPA individuals (7 nfvPPA, 10 svPPA, and 16 lvPPA). In classifier task, svPPA and lvPPA scored lower (p<0.01), though lvPPA were more responsive to choices than svPPA (p<0.001). The classifier score significantly correlated with volumetric changes over the left middle, inferior temporal, and fusiform gyri, brain regions typically associated with semantic functions. For orthographic dictation task, all three PPA variants performed worse than controls (p<0.001), and distinctive dysgraphia phenotypes were noted in each variant (svPPA: phonological plausible and perseveration errors; nfvPPA: motoric, radical and morphemic errors; lvPPA: visual and stroke errors, P<0.001). In motor speech task, nfvPPA showed lower

Combining Neuropsychological Assessment with Neuroimaging to Distinguish Early-Stage Alzheimer’s Disease from Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration in Non-Western Tonal Native Language-Speaking Individuals Living in Taiwan: A Case Series

“…Overall, our findings, together with previously published results (see, for example, [ 35 , 85 , 87 ]), provide evidence supporting the importance of adjusting NPTs to target social cognition and language (i.e., adjusted for particular societies) in the differential diagnosis of MCI/AD and FTLD (i.e., bvFTD and nfvPPA) in culturally different and typologically diverse language populations. However, the small sample size, consisting of only nine individuals (i.e., eight patients and one control), did not make it possible to undertake any statistical analysis and, correspondingly, strongly limited the interpretation of the obtained data.…”

“…This means that the current understanding of PPA is mainly established based on English-speaking patients [ 56 ]. The expansion of research on PPA to non-English speaking populations, especially to tonal native language-speaking individuals, requires accounting for the specificities of languages [ 87 ]. Chinese is a tonal and classifier language, where the meaning of a particular word is based on the appropriate combination of pronunciation and tone (i.e., different combinations of tone and pronunciation may have different meanings) and classifiers are necessary to quantify numeral nouns (e.g., in Chinese, when talking about a chair, one would say “one chair”) [ 57 ].…”