A significant amount of work has been completed under the ProResA within the last 12 project months of the action, significant progress has been taken underway. In the following details of the action’s progress are reported. As mentioned in our earlier periodic report, the outgoing phase of the action was severely impacted by the COVID pandemic. We covered most of the work of the action in the last 12 months and the most effort-intense work was conducted under WP1 and WP2.
Outcomes from the action can be summarised as the following:
Pronouns are selectively impaired in PPA. Results from WP1 indicate that pronouns is a vulnerable grammatical category that dissolves as primary progressive aphasia becomes worse over time. This is based on a case study on individuals with PPA suffering from logopenic and non-fluent variants. We observed that pronoun impairment is manifested in the non-fluent variant but less so in the logopenic variant. Therefore, it seems that pronoun impairment across PPA variants might be selective. Results from WP1 are being processed with promising outcomes, we have a poster accepted in the Nordic Aphasia Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, in June 2023 reporting on this work, and are preparing for publication.
Although work in WP2 has not yet come to a point where we can make conclusions on the data, as analysis of the data is still ongoing, it is possible to draw some insights from the work conducted so far. In an earlier EEG study published under this action, we know that electrophysiological responses are modulated by working memory. Following this, we have run a MEG study with a total of 16 healthy participants. Data processing is in progress.
In WG3, Dr. Arslan worked on data analysis and publication of the Turkish eye-tracking study, which included groups of healthy controls and people with post-stroke aphasia recruited during the earlier phases of the action. Outcomes from this study were presented at the Science of Aphasia conference in Bordeaux, France, in September 2022. A publication is under review. A second publication reported experimental data on how Turkish PWA comprehend “quantifiers” while resolving pronouns is under review. Furthermore, two important publications appeared in 2022 reporting data on sentence repetition span in French PPA showing that sentence span might be an important factor in dissociating PPA from other neurıocognitive disorders.
