Mesulam's (1982) report describing six patients with a slowly progressive aphasia without accompanying signs of dementia led to the recognition of a syndrome now known as Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). Many more patients have been described since Mesulam's description was published: 171 published contacts with 112 patients diagnosed with the syndrome are reviewed in this thesis. However, the published literature is both unsystematic and incomplete, making it difficult to place the findings into a coherent theoretical framework. In addition, no previous work has specifically attempted to specify the difference between PPA and dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT), although the two disorders are easily confused since many language deficits can masquerade as memory or cognitive deficits. This thesis is an attempt to remedy these short-comings. Using a serial case study approach, the linguistic deficits of 11 PPA patients are analyzed in a cognitive neuropsychological framework, and contrasted with the linguistic deficits of a group of 11 DAT patients. Several tools were developed or refined specifically to manage the details of such an analysis. These include a production system designed to infer functional dissociations in the language system from an analysis of patient performance on a computerized version of the Psycholinguistic Assessment Battery (Caplan & Bub, 1990). Although the results suggest that there is great heterogeneity of symptoms within the PPA population, several deficits which may prove useful in making the differential diagnosis are examined closely, including deficits in reading, abstract word comprehension, auditory comprehension, affixed word processing, and semantic access. Implications of the findings for current models of language processing are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.40020 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Westbury, Chris |
| Contributors | Bub, Daniel (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001484437, proquestno: NN12509, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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