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Behavioural and neuroanatomical correlates of auditory speech analysis in primary progressive aphasias

Hardy, CJD; Agustus, JL; Marshall, CR; Clark, CN; Russell, LL; Bond, RL; Brotherhood, EV; Thomas, DL; Crutch, SJ; Rohrer, JD; et al. Hardy, CJD; Agustus, JL; Marshall, CR; Clark, CN; Russell, LL; Bond, RL; Brotherhood, EV; Thomas, DL; Crutch, SJ; Rohrer, JD; Warren, JD (2017) Behavioural and neuroanatomical correlates of auditory speech analysis in primary progressive aphasias. Alzheimer's Research & Therapy, 9 (1). p. 53. ISSN 1758-9193 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13195-017-0278-2
SGUL Authors: Clark, Camilla Neegaard

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Abstract

Background Non-verbal auditory impairment is increasingly recognised in the primary progressive aphasias (PPAs) but its relationship to speech processing and brain substrates has not been defined. Here we addressed these issues in patients representing the non-fluent variant (nfvPPA) and semantic variant (svPPA) syndromes of PPA. Methods We studied 19 patients with PPA in relation to 19 healthy older individuals. We manipulated three key auditory parameters—temporal regularity, phonemic spectral structure and prosodic predictability (an index of fundamental information content, or entropy)—in sequences of spoken syllables. The ability of participants to process these parameters was assessed using two-alternative, forced-choice tasks and neuroanatomical associations of task performance were assessed using voxel-based morphometry of patients’ brain magnetic resonance images. Results Relative to healthy controls, both the nfvPPA and svPPA groups had impaired processing of phonemic spectral structure and signal predictability while the nfvPPA group additionally had impaired processing of temporal regularity in speech signals. Task performance correlated with standard disease severity and neurolinguistic measures. Across the patient cohort, performance on the temporal regularity task was associated with grey matter in the left supplementary motor area and right caudate, performance on the phoneme processing task was associated with grey matter in the left supramarginal gyrus, and performance on the prosodic predictability task was associated with grey matter in the right putamen. Conclusions Our findings suggest that PPA syndromes may be underpinned by more generic deficits of auditory signal analysis, with a distributed cortico-subcortical neuraoanatomical substrate extending beyond the canonical language network. This has implications for syndrome classification and biomarker development.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link tothe Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Keywords: 11 Medical and Health Sciences
SGUL Research Institute / Research Centre: Academic Structure > Molecular and Clinical Sciences Research Institute (MCS)
Journal or Publication Title: Alzheimer's Research & Therapy
ISSN: 1758-9193
Language: en
Dates:
DateEvent
27 July 2017Published
16 June 2017Accepted
Publisher License: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0
Projects:
Project IDFunderFunder ID
AS-PG-16-007Alzheimer's SocietyUNSPECIFIED
CBRC 161National Institute for Health Researchhttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000272
ART-SRF2010-3Alzheimer's Research UKUNSPECIFIED
091673/Z/10/ZWellcome Trusthttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100004440
URI: https://openaccess.sgul.ac.uk/id/eprint/112256
Publisher's version: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13195-017-0278-2

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