Semantic Disorders Research Articles

The impact of visual and motor skills on ideational apraxia and transcortical sensory aphasia

Background Patients with extensive left hemisphere damage frequently have ideational apraxia (IA) and transcortical sensory aphasia (TSA). Difficulty with action coordination, phonological processing, and complex motor planning may not be indicative of higher-order motor programming or higher-order complex formation. We report on the effects of IA and TSA on the visual and motor skill of stroke patients. Purpose The study aims to address the question of whether IA and TSA in bilingual individuals are the results of an error of motor function alone or due to a combined motor plus and cognitive dysfunction effect. Method Twelve bilingual patients (seven males, and five females) were diagnosed with IA and TSA, and are divided into two groups of six patients. Then, 12 healthy bilingual controls were evaluated for comparing with both groups. Bilingual aphasia testing (BAT) and appropriate behavioral evaluation were used to assess motor skills, including coordination, visual-motor testing, and phonological processing. Results Findings (pointing skills) show that the performance of the L1 and L2 languages are consistently significant (p < 0.001) in healthy individuals compared to the IA and TSA groups. Command skills for L1 and L2 languages were significantly higher in healthy individuals compared to IA and TSA controls (p < 0.001). Further, the orthographic skills of IA and TSA vs controls in both groups were significantly reduced (p < 0.01). Visual skills in the L1 language were significantly improved (p < 0.05) in IA and TSA patients compared to healthy controls after 2 months. Unlike orthographic skills which were improved in IA and TSA patients, languages in bilingual patients did not simultaneously improve. Conclusion Dyspraxia is a condition that affects both motor and visual cognitive functions, and patients who have it often have less referred motor skills. The current dataset shows that accurate visual cognition requires both cognitive-linguistic and sensory-motor processes. Motor issues should be highlighted, and skills and functionality should be reinforced along with the significance of treatment between IA and TSA corresponding to age and education. This can be a good indicator for treating semantic disorders.

Diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease based on 3D ResNet: The frontal lobe is crucial

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a serious neurological disease. Many studies have preseted regions of interest such as substantia nigra (SN) for PD detection from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, the SN is not the only region with remarkable tissue changes in PD MRIs. Patients with Prodromal Parkinson’s Disease usually present with non-motor symptoms, and the associated brain regions may show varying degrees of damage on imaging. Therefore, exploring PD-related regions from whole-brain MRI is essential. In this study, we proposed an interpretable PD detection framework, including PD classification and feature region visualization. Specifically, we constructed a 3D ResNet model that could detect PD from whole-brain MRIs and discover other brain regions related to PD through 3D Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) and Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). We obtained T1-Weighted MRIs from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) database. The average classification accuracy of the 5-fold cross-validation and held-out dataset reached 96.1% and 94.5%, respectively. In addition, we used the 3D Grad-CAM framework to extract the weight of the feature map and obtain visual interpretation. The heat map highlighted the regions that were crucial for PD classification and found significant differences between PD and HC in frontal lobe related to linguistic semantic disorders. The UPDRS scores of PD and HC on the linguistic semantic function items were also remarkably different. Combined with previous studies, this work verified the significance of the frontal lobe and proved that the correlation between the frontal lobe and the pathogenesis of PD was explanatory.

Changing perspectives on frontotemporal dementia: A review.

This article examines the evolution in understanding of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) during the last four decades. A central theme is the recognition of heterogeneity. Originally construed as a disorder of behaviour and executive impairment, FTD is now known also to be associated with alterations in language, conceptual knowledge and praxis. An absence of neurological signs is the hallmark of many FTD patients, but there is also an established association with motor neurone disease (MND), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and corticobasal degeneration (CBD). FTD is commonly defined as an early onset dementia, yet about a quarter of patients present after the age of 65. The underlying pathological protein is tau, TDP-43 or more rarely fused-in-sarcoma (FUS). Distinct genetic mutations have been identified in familial FTD. There are predictable relationships between clinical phenotype, pathological substrate and genetic mutation. For example, a circumscribed semantic disorder predicts TDP-43 pathology, and speech or limb apraxia tau pathology. The co-occurrence of MND predicts TDP-43 pathology, and PSP and CBD tau pathology. FUS pathology is associated with very youthful onset, stereotyped behaviours and caudate atrophy. Non-fluent aphasia is linked to progranulin (GRN) mutations and MND and psychosis to repeat expansions in the C9orf72 gene. Despite striking worldwide consensus in findings there remain some issues of contention, largely related to the classification of FTD and its sub-variants. Understanding the diverse nature of FTD is crucial for effective diagnosis, management and the development of targeted therapies.

Expressive Language Used by Autistic Main Character in Please Stand By (2017) Movie

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty using language in communication. The language of autism sufferers in expressive language disorders includes phonological disorders, syntactic disorders, semantic disorders, and pragmatic disorders. The purpose of this study was to determine the types of expressive language disorders used by the main character in the movie Please Stand By (2017). The method of this research was descriptive qualitative because this research describes the phenomenon of expressive language disorder in the Please Stand By (2017) movie. The source of data used in this research is the script from the movie. Once collected, the data are categorized and analyzed based on their respective categories. In this research, the researcher found that Wendy exhibited several symptoms of a type of expressive language disorder, namely semantic disorders and pragmatic disorders. This disorder can be seen from the symptoms shown by the main character through her speech.

Correlations between Persistent Olfactory and Semantic Memory Disorders after SARS-CoV-2 Infection.

Background: One of the main symptoms of COVID-19 is hyposmia or even anosmia. Olfactory identification is most often affected. In addition, some cognitive disorders tend to appear following the infection, particularly regarding executive functions, attention, and memory. Olfaction, and especially olfactory identification, is related to semantic memory which manages general knowledge about the world. The main objective of this study was to determine whether semantic memory is impaired in case of persistent post COVID-19 olfactory disorders. Methods: 84 patients (average age of 42.8 ± 13.6 years) with post COVID-19 olfactory loss were included after consulting to the ENT department. The clinical evaluation was carried out with the Pyramid and Palm Tree Test, the word-retrieval task from the Grémots, the Sniffin’ Sticks Test and the Computerised Olfactory Test for the Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. Results: Semantic memory was impaired in 20% (n = 17) of patients, especially in the 19–39 age-group. The olfactory threshold was only significantly correlated with the semantic memory scores. Conclusions: Similar to all cognitive disorders, semantic disorders can have a negative impact on quality of life if left untreated. It is essential to carry out specific assessments of post COVID-19 patients to accurately determine their disorders and to put in place the best possible rehabilitation, such as speech and language therapy, to avoid quality-of-life impairment.

When taking the bull by the horns is not possible: comprehension of idioms in patients with aphasia and dementia (Cuando no es posible coger el toro por los cuernos: la comprensión de modismos en pacientes con afasia y demencia)

This work analysed the comprehension of three types of idioms of the V+NP form (e.g., bite the dust) in seven patients with aphasia and two patients with probable Alzheimer’s disease, frontal variant. The aphasic patients included in the study had a severe semantic disorder or a mild semantic deficit, or only a lexical disturbance. Participants with dementia showed a moderate deterioration in their executive functions and no impairment in their psycholinguistic performance. In this study, we used an idiom–word matching task, administered in two versions. The results indicate dissimilar performance patterns, according to patients’ neuropsychological impairment. In particular, patients with a severe semantic disorder showed a poor understanding of the figurative meanings of idioms, especially if those idioms were not fully transparent or opaque. Participants with a mild semantic deficit accessed the non-literal meanings of the idioms showing less difficulty in the case of certain idiomatic expressions. Patients with executive function deficit showed a double interference effect, and although they could activate the figurative and literal meanings of idioms according to the context in which they were presented, it was difficult for them to inhibit those meanings whenever necessary and activate the alternative meaning. This effect was more pronounced the less transparent the idiom was.

Disrupting self-evaluative processing with electrostimulation mapping during awake brain surgery

Brain awake surgery with cognitive monitoring for tumor removal has become a standard of treatment for functional purpose. Yet, little attention has been given to patients’ interpretation and awareness of their own responses to selected cognitive tasks during direct electrostimulation (DES). We aim to report disruptions of self-evaluative processing evoked by DES during awake surgery. We further investigate cortico-subcortical structures involved in self-assessment process and report the use of an intraoperative self-assessment tool, the self-confidence index (SCI). Seventy-two patients who had undergone awake brain tumor resections were selected. Inclusion criteria were the occurrence of a DES-induced disruption of an ongoing task followed by patient’s failure to remember or criticize these impairments, or a dissociation between patient’s responses to an ongoing task and patient’s SCI. Disruptions of self-evaluation were frequently associated with semantic disorders and critical sites were mostly found along the left/right ventral semantic streams. Disconnectome analyses generated from a tractography-based atlas confirmed the high probability of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus to be transitory ‘disconnected’. These findings suggest that white matters pathways belonging to the ventral semantic stream may be critically involved in human self-evaluative processing. Finally, the authors discuss the implementation of the SCI task during multimodal intraoperative monitoring.

Establishing links between abnormal eating behaviours and semantic deficits in dementia.

The hypothesis that semantic deficits in dementia may contribute in producing changes in eating preferences has never been experimentally investigated despite this association has been clinically observed. We administered tasks assessing semantic memory and the Appetite and Eating Habits Questionnaire (APEHQ) to 23 patients with dementia (behavioural frontotemporal dementia, primary progressive aphasia, and Alzheimer's disease) and to 21 healthy controls. We used voxel-based morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging to identify regions and white matter tracts of significant atrophy associated with the performance at the semantic tasks and the pathological scores at the APEHQ. We observed that the lower the patients' scores at semantic tasks, the higher their changes in eating habits and preferences. Both semantic disorders and eating alterations correlated with atrophy in the temporal lobes and white matter tracts connecting the temporal lobe with frontal regions such as the arcuate fasciculus, the cingulum, and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus. These results confirm that semantic deficits underlie specific eating alterations in dementia patients.

A Descriptive Study of Semantic-Pragmatic Language Disorder in Two Adults

This paper studies the concept of semantic and pragmatic disorders in adults, using two adults as case study. We shall work within the theoretical framework of semantics, pragmatics and theories on semantic and pragmatic disorders. Our main finding is that this impairment does exist in adults who may exhibit very little obvious disability in their expressive language behaviour but manifest poor conversational and dialogical skills. They have a high tendency of misinterpreting utterances and are very easily misunderstood themselves. Keywords: Dialogical, disorder, pragmatic, semantic. DOI : 10.7176/JLLL/60-03 Publication date :September 30 th 2019

Questionnaire Sémantique de Québec (QueSQ). Développement, validation et normalisation.

The main objective of this study was to present the development, validation and normalization of the Quebec Semantic Questionnaire (QueSQ). The QueSQ is a 12-item questionnaire designed for the rapid screening of semantic disorders. Psycholinguistic parameters that can influence performance, such as the nature of semantic features and superordinate semantic categories, were taken into account during its development. Psychometric qualities of QueSQ were demonstrated during the validation process. QueSQ normative data were established on the basis of age and level of education, from a sample of 100 Franco-Quebecers aged 50 years and over.

What a pooled data study tells us about the relationships between gender and knowledge of semantic categories

ABSTRACTIntroduction: Both the neuropsychological study of patients with category-specific semantic disorders (CSSD) and the experimental research on categorical processing in healthy subjects (HSs) have shown that men are mainly impaired with fruits and vegetables and women with animals and artifacts. Since this difference is more striking in patients with CSSD than in HSs, we hypothesized that the lack of power of some investigations conducted with HSs and the different methods used in studies conducted with HSs and patients with CSSD could explain some of these inconsistencies and that a study conducted with a very large number of HSs using visual naming tasks should strongly confirm the role of gender in categorical tasks.Methods: Picture naming data gathered during the last ten years with our category-specificity paradigm from a large number (702) of HSs were reanalyzed.Results: As predicted, men named significantly more animals and artifacts, while women named more plant life items.Discussion: These data confirm that, if different domains of knowledge are studied in a very large sample of HSs using a picture naming task equivalent to the naming tasks used in most anatomo-clinical studies on CSSD, then the gender effects are highly significant.

Why do herpes simplex encephalitis and semantic dementia show a different pattern of semantic impairment in spite of their main common involvement within the anterior temporal lobes?

A very challenging problem in the domain of the cognitive neurosciences is to explain why herpes simplex encephalitis and semantic dementia show, respectively, a category-specific semantic disorder for biological entities and an across-categories semantic disruption, despite highly overlapping areas of anterior temporal lobe damage. The aim of the present review consisted in trying to make a separate survey of anatomo-clinical investigations (single-case studies and group studies) and of activation studies, in order to analyse the factors that could explain these different patterns of semantic disruption. Factors taken into account in this review were laterality of lesions, disease aetiology, kind of brain pathology and locus of damage within the temporal lobes. Locus of damage within the temporal lobes and kind of brain pathology seemed to play the most important role, because in patients with herpes simplex encephalitis and category-specific semantic disorder for biological entities the lesions prevailed in the anteromedial temporal lobes. Furthermore, the neuropathology concerned both the anterior temporal cortices and the white matter pathways connecting these areas with the posterior visual areas, whereas in semantic dementia the inferior longitudinal fasciculus involvement was restricted to the rostral temporal lobe and did not extend into the cortically uninvolved occipital lobe.

Awake Surgery for Gliomas within the Right Inferior Parietal Lobule: New Insights into the Functional Connectivity Gained from Stimulation Mapping and Surgical Implications.

Little is known about the functional role of the white matter connections running within and around the right inferior parietal lobule (IPL). We used direct electrostimulation during awake surgery to investigate this connectivity and to avoid permanent deficit after resection for right IPL gliomas. We reviewed patients who underwent awake mapping for a glioma involving the right IPL. Resection was achieved up to functional corticosubcortical boundaries detected by electrostimulation. Results of the intraoperative mapping were confronted to preoperative and postoperative magnetic resonance imaging to perform anatomofunctional correlations. Fourteen consecutive patients were enrolled (9 men; mean age, 44 years). Cortically, the resection was limited anteriorly by the retrocentral somatosensory area (11 patients) or by the precentral motor cortex (3 patients). Subcortically, the thalamocortical pathways were identified anteriorly in all patients. Articulatory disturbances were elicited anteriorly and laterally (6 patients) corresponding to the superior longitudinal fasciculus part III. Deeper and superiorly, stimulating the superior longitudinal fasciculus part II or the arcuate fasciculus induced spatial disorders (6 patients). More laterally and posteriorly, disrupting the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus induced nonverbal semantic disorders (7 patients). Six patients had visual deficits while the optic radiations were stimulated. A total or subtotal resection was achieved in all patients but one. There were no permanent impairments, except an expected left superior quadrantanopia in 4 patients. This is the first surgical series focusing on right IPL gliomas. The complex functional connectivity detected within and around this region fully supports the use of intraoperative multimodal functional mapping for optimizing outcomes.

What is semantic in semantic dementia? The decay of knowledge of physical entities but not of verbs, numbers and body parts

ABSTRACTBackground: Conceptual knowledge does not decay randomly in patients with cerebral damage, suggesting that dedicated neural substrates may support different categories of knowledge. Semantic dementia is an optimal natural model for studying the organization of semantic memory. Nevertheless, in a pathology primarily characterized by a semantic memory disorder categorical- and modality- specific effects are not obvious findings. In fact, there is no clear evidence of categorical effects, at least concerning two broad categories of knowledge, that is, natural items and artifacts. Furthermore, transmodal deficits do not seem to be the rule in SD. Also quite robust is the observation that some conceptual domains are relatively spared in this pathology, that is, numerical knowledge, abstract words, and action verbs.Aims: To explore category specific and modality specific deficit in SD and to support the evidence that semantic degradation in SD primarily involves knowledge of the objects in the real world, whereas categories of knowledge whose items can be less easily identified by surface attributes, such as verbs, numbers and body parts, are more preserved.Methods and Procedures: We investigated the semantic impairment in 8 patients with Semantic Dementia (SD). Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in each patient was also obtainedOutcomes and Results: In some patients manmade objects were significantly more preserved than natural items, verbs more preserved than nouns and the number system entirely preserved; the body parts category was the least impaired in all subjects; finally, in three patients visual semantic knowledge was significantly more preserved than verbal semantic knowledge. VBM showed that atrophy of the anterior inferior temporal regions was insufficient to impair knowledge about verbs, numbers and body parts, whose impairment was associated with more widespread atrophy. In subjects whose verbal semantic knowledge was significantly more impaired than visual semantic knowledge, atrophy was principally distributed in the left hemisphere. In patients with significant impairment for natural items compared to manmade objects, atrophy was not confine in the temporal lobes.Conclusion: We conclude that in SD semantic decay primarily involves the real-world items whose knowledge is processed by surface sensorifunctional features and that this is the type of knowledge stored in the temporal lobes. Our data support a model that associates a semantic hub with modality/category specific neural substrates.

The Anterior Temporal Lobes: New Frontiers Opened to Neuropsychological Research by Changes in Health Care and Disease Epidemiology.

Changes in health care and disease epidemiology have shifted the attention of neuropsychologists and cognitive neuroscientists from vascular lesions to degenerative diseases or other bilateral brain lesions. This displacement of attention from vascular patients to patients with degenerative brain diseases allowed the discovery of hitherto unexplored and unheralded aspects of the neural substrates of human cognition. Three aspects of research on the anterior parts of the temporal lobes (ATLs) are the focus of the present review. The first aspect is category-specific semantic disorders, including current accounts of categorical brain organization, the anatomical substrate of different categories (stressing the role of the ATLs with respect to the biological categories), and the "sources of knowledge" that contribute to construction of those categories. The second aspect is the role of the ATLs in conceptual knowledge, including the "hub-and-spokes" model of semantic representation and semantic control. The third aspect is the role of the right ATL in recognition of familiar people, including the distinction made between associative prosopagnosia and multimodal disorders of person recognition. Consistencies and inconsistencies of results obtained across these different domains are discussed, and the clinical implications of these findings are considered.

Concurrent language disorders in children with idiopathic epilepsy

ObjectivesThe relationship between language and epilepsy remains complex. Language disorder and epilepsy can be concomitant but unrelated phenomena. They can also be separate consequences of the same underlying brain pathology. Epilepsy can also be the direct cause of the language disorder. The aim of this study was to study concurrent language disorders in children with idiopathic epilepsy.Study designThis cross-sectional study was conducted on 50 children attending the Neurology Clinic at Alexandria University Children Hospital at El-Shatby with the diagnosis of idiopathic epilepsy. Their ages ranged from 3 to 6 years, and 29 were male and 21 were female. These children were divided into two groups: group 1 included 25 cases with idiopathic generalized epilepsy, and group 2 included 25 cases with idiopathic focal epilepsy. All cases were subjected to thorough history taking, assessment of epilepsy severity using the National Hospital Seizure Severity Scale, and comprehensive neurological examination. They were also subjected to digital electroencephalographic recording. The studied cases had undergone psychometric assessment using the Stanford–Binet Test and language assessment using the Comprehensive Arabic Language Test.The study was approved by the Ethics Committee at the Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria University. Consent was taken from all cases to participate in the study.ResultsThirty-two (64%) children with idiopathic epilepsy presented with developmental language disorders. As regards the observed disorders, 30 (93.7%) cases presented with phonological disorder, 29 (90.6%) presented with semantic disorders, 29 (90.6%) presented with syntax disorders, 20 (62.5%) presented with morphological disorders, and 28 (87.5%) cases presented with pragmatic disorders. Male sex, age (54.48±9 months), and uncontrolled epilepsy demonstrated to have a higher risk for developmental language disorders.ConclusionMale sex, age, and uncontrolled epilepsy are risk factors.

Test–retest reliability of the N400 component in a sentence-reading paradigm

ABSTRACTThe N400 component of the event-related potential is considered an index of semantic processing and therefore may be an ideal biomarker of semantic system disorders or individual differences. To this purpose, it is necessary to assess its test–retest reliability. Only one previous study has addressed this question, reporting good test–retest reliability (r = 0.85). However, that study had used a word-pair priming paradigm, which differs in many respects from the more typical and ecologically valid sentence-reading. The present study surveys test–retest reliability of the N400 in a sentence-reading paradigm. The best value obtained was r = 0.63, implying a relatively poor test–retest reliability. Crucial factors for this result may be the long interval between context and critical word as well as more complex contexts in sentence-reading paradigms. These factors might make the N400 effects in sentences more vulnerable to linguistic and non-linguistic factors increasing the variance across sessions.

Brain Network for the Core Deficits of Semantic Dementia: A Neural Network Connectivity-Behavior Mapping Study.

Individuals with semantic dementia (SD) typically suffer from selective semantic deficits due to degenerative brain atrophy. Although some brain regions have been found to be correlated with the semantic impairments of SD patients, it is unclear if the damage is actually responsible for SD patients’ semantic disorders because these findings were primarily obtained by examining the roles of local individual regions themselves without considering the influence of other regions that are functionally or structurally connected to the local individual regions. To resolve this problem, we investigated, from the brain network perspective, the relationship between the brain-network measures of regions and connections with semantic performance in 17 SD patients. We found that the severity of semantic deficits of SD patients was significantly correlated with the degree centrality values of the left anterior hippocampus (aHIP). Moreover, the semantic performance of the patients was also significantly correlated with the strength of gray matter functional connectivity of this region and two other regions: the left temporal pole/insula (TP/INS) and the left middle temporal gyrus. We further observed that the strength of the white matter structural connectivity of the left aHIP-left TP/INS tract could effectively predict the semantic performance of SD patients. When we controlled for a wide range of potential confounding factors (e.g., total gray matter volume), the above effects still held well. These findings revealed the critical brain network with the left aHIP as the center that could be contributing to the semantic impairments of SD.

The Differential Contributions of Conceptual Representation Format and Language Structure to Levels of Semantic Abstraction Capacity.

This paper reviews some controversies concerning the original and revised versions of the 'hub-and-spoke' model of conceptual representations and their implication for abstraction capacity levels. The 'hub-and-spoke' model, which is based on data gathered in patients with semantic dementia (SD), is the most authoritative model of conceptual knowledge. Patterson et al.'s (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(12), 976-987, 2007) classical version of this model maintained that conceptual representations are stored in a unitary 'amodal' format in the right and left anterior temporal lobes (ATLs), because in SD the semantic disorder cuts across modalities and categories. Several authors questioned the unitary nature of these representations. They showed that the semantic impairment is 'multi-modal'only in the advanced stages of SD, when atrophy affects the ATLs bilaterally, but that impariments can be modality-specific in lateralised (early) stages of the disease. In these cases, SD mainly affects lexical-semantic knowledge when atrophy predominates on the left side and pictorial representations when atrophy prevails on the right side. Some aspects of the model (i.e. the importance of spokes, the multimodal format of representations and the graded convergence of modalities within the ATLs), which had already been outlined by Rogers et al. (Psychological Review, 111(1), 205-235, 2004) in a computational model of SD, were strengthened by these results. The relevance of these theoretical problems and of empirical data concerning the neural substrate of concrete and abstract words is discussed critically. The conclusion of the review is that the highest levels of abstraction are due more to the structuring influence of language than to the format of representations.

M26. Semantic Priming and Self-Reported Thought Disorder

M26. Semantic Priming and Self-Reported Thought Disorder