Language & Cognition seminar - Dr Chris Hardy

More than words: auditory perceptual changes in primary progressive aphasia.

The primary progressive aphasias (PPAs) are a diverse set of dementias that affect speech and language. Three main variants are currently recognized: semantic dementia (semantic variant PPA), progressive nonfluent aphasia (nonfluent/ agrammatic variant PPA), and logopenic progressive aphasia (logopenic variant PPA). Despite being characterized as “language-led”, people with PPA often report having problems with hearing, and emerging experimental work suggests that deficits in auditory processing accompany language symptoms. In this seminar, combining results from functional magnetic resonance imaging, voxel-based morphometry, and behavioural experiments, I will suggest that the three major PPA variants have separable profiles of auditory perceptual changes, with implications for diagnosis and classification. I will go on to describe our work exploring retained capacity for perceptual learning of artificially degraded speech stimuli in PPA, and consider possible avenues for therapeutic strategies informed by this work.