Impaired phonemic discrimination in logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia

Abstract

Logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA) is the least well defined of the major primary progressive aphasia (PPA) syndromes. We assessed phoneme discrimination in patients with PPA (semantic, nonfluent/agrammatic, and logopenic variants) and typical Alzheimer's disease, relative to healthy age-matched participants. The lvPPA group performed significantly worse than all other groups apart from tAD, after adjusting for auditory verbal working memory. In the combined PPA cohort, voxel-based morphometry correlated phonemic discrimination score with grey matter in left angular gyrus. Our findings suggest that impaired phonemic discrimination may help differentiate lvPPA from other PPA subtypes, with important diagnostic and management implications.