TY  - JOUR
AU  - Billette, Ornella V.
AU  - Preiß, Daniel
AU  - Nestor, Peter J.
TI  - The concept of regularization: Resolving the problem of surface dyslexia in semantic variant primary progressive aphasia across different languages.
JO  - Neuropsychology
VL  - 34
IS  - 3
SN  - 1931-1559
CY  - Washington, DC
PB  - Assoc.
M1  - DZNE-2020-01171
SP  - 298-307
PY  - 2020
AB  - Surface dyslexia, a diagnostic feature of the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), is difficult to observe in many languages. It can be conceptualized as one manifestation of a more general “regularization” effect—that is, with semantic impairment, patients fail to recognize exceptions and revert to default rules. Objective: We predicted that, analogous to surface dyslexia in English, German patients with svPPA would regularize irregular verbs, especially those of lower frequency and in the less frequently used preterite tense. Method: Regularization was investigated in German through past-tense verb inflectional morphology in N = 10 svPPA, N = 5 PPA related to Alzheimer pathology (Aß+PPA), N = 5 patients with nonfluent variant PPA (nfvPPA), N = 12 typical (amnestic presentation) Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and N = 32 healthy controls. The task involved perfect- and preterite-tense inflection of regular and irregular verbs of high and low frequency. Results: Errors in svPPA particularly involved regularization (e.g., I swim → I swimmed, I have swimmed), whereas Aß+PPA made a wide range of other errors (e.g., verb agreement or tense errors). Regularization was rare in AD and controls, whereas the expected frequency effects (low worse than high) were found in svPPA. nfvPPA had profound difficulties in inflecting verbs in general. Conclusion: The study illustrates how tests tailored to a specific language can reveal the regularization effect of svPPA. For more universal diagnostic recommendations, future revisions for svPPA should consider substituting the criterion of surface dyslexia for that of a general criterion of regularization of language rules, the former being an example of the latter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
KW  - Aged
KW  - Aged, 80 and over
KW  - Alzheimer Disease: pathology
KW  - Alzheimer Disease: psychology
KW  - Aphasia, Primary Progressive: psychology
KW  - Aphasia, Primary Progressive: therapy
KW  - Dyslexia: psychology
KW  - Dyslexia: therapy
KW  - Female
KW  - Humans
KW  - Language
KW  - Male
KW  - Middle Aged
KW  - Psychomotor Performance
KW  - Semantics
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:31868373
DO  - DOI:10.1037/neu0000611
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/151587
ER  -