Trying to tell a tale

Abstract

Impaired day-to-day communication in nonaphasic frontotemporal dementia patients with a disorder of social comportment and executive functioning is due in part to a striking deficit in discourse organization associated with right frontotemporal disease. Difficulty with discourse in progressive aphasia is due largely to the language impairments of these patients.

Syntactic and thematic components of sentence processing in progressive nonfluent aphasia and nonaphasic frontotemporal dementia

“…Despite the lack of aphasic presentation, SOC/EXEC patients' executive limitations have been demonstrated to influence language processing. For example, SOC/EXEC patients have difficulty with working memory aspects of sentence processing (Cooke et al, 2003), and their working memory difficulty correlates with difficulty organizing the elements of a narrative (Ash et al, 2006). In a lexical acquisition task, SOC/EXEC patients did not differ statistically from controls in their processing of grammatical or semantic information associated with a new verb, but were significantly impaired in processing the new verb's thematic relations (Murray, Koenig, Antani, McCawley, & Grossman, 2007).…”

Narrative speech production: An fMRI study using continuous arterial spin labeling

“…The second baseline involved looking at the ordered pictures of the entire story while producing a nonsense word to control for low level motor components of articulation and suppress executive resources associated with inner speech such as the phonologic loop of working memory. Based on our previous experience with correlative studies of narrative speech deficits with frontal cortical atrophy in FTD (Ash et al, 2006) and previous studies of narrative speech in a PET environment (Braun et al, 2001), we hypothesized that we would see activations consistent with our two-component model of narrative, including bilateral frontal activation to support narrative organization and temporal-parietal activation to support story content during narrative expression.…”

“…Direct evidence relating narrative limitations to a specific neuroanatomic substrate comes from a correlative study of these non-aphasic FTD patients. Using a voxel-based morphometric analysis of cortical volume, Ash et al (2006) observed a specific correlation between limited connectedness in story narrative and cortical atrophy in prefrontal, inferior frontal, and temporal regions of FTD patients.…”

“…These patients experience significant narrative difficulty (Ash et al, 2006;Chapman et al, 2005). A detailed analysis of performance when narrating a wordless picture story shows these patients have a limited grasp of the story's overall theme and poor connectedness between specific events in their stories, even though lexical and grammatical aspects of word and sentence use are relatively preserved (Ash et al, 2006).…”

“…These patients experience significant narrative difficulty (Ash et al, 2006;Chapman et al, 2005). A detailed analysis of performance when narrating a wordless picture story shows these patients have a limited grasp of the story's overall theme and poor connectedness between specific events in their stories, even though lexical and grammatical aspects of word and sentence use are relatively preserved (Ash et al, 2006). Additional evidence consistent with impaired top-down organization comes from a selective deficit at detecting errors in the ordering of script events in these social and executive FTD patients, and their greater deficit with event ordering than the detection of semantic substitutions in a script (Cosentino, Chute, Libon, Moore, & Grossman, 2006).…”