Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology.

'Non-semantic' aspects of language in semantic dementia: as normal as they're said to be?

Benedet M, Patterson K, Gomez-Pastor I, Luisa Garcia de la Rocha M

Faculty of Psychology, University Complutense of Madrid, Spain. mbenedet@psi.ucm.es

This article describes a 52-month longitudinal study of a patient, ILJ, whose semantic profile fits the criteria for a classical case of semantic dementia (SD). As in all such cases, it was the semantic aspects of receptive and expressive language processing--essentially vocabulary--that were most dramatically affected. The novel observation from this study is ILJ's performance on a comprehensive language examination. Results from this assessment, even early in the course of his disease, are compatible with the hypothesis that phonological, morphological and/or syntactic aspects of language processing may be disrupted by their interaction with degraded information from the semantic system.

Published 6 March 2006 in Neurocase, 12(1): 15-26.
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