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Publications (57)
Neuroscience research has provided evidence that semantic information is stored in a distributed brain network involved in sensorimotor and linguistic processing. More specifically, according to the embodied cognition accounts, the representation of concepts is deemed as grounded in our bodily states. For these reasons, normative measures of words...
The linguistic and anatomical variability of the logopenic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (lv-PPA) as defined by current diagnostic criteria has been the topic of an intense debate. The present review and meta-analysis aims at characterizing the profile of lv-PPA, by a comprehensive analysis of the available literature on the neuropsycholog...
Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) classification relies on profile characterization of quantitatively impaired/spared performance in language tasks. In this study, we coextracted eight qualitative types of errors in 67 PPA patients submitted to a comprehensive language assessment. Canonical correlation analysis was applied to simultaneously correla...
Background
Neuropsychological testing plays a cardinal role in the diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer’s disease. A major concern is represented by the heterogeneity of the neuropsychological batteries currently adopted in memory clinics and healthcare centers. The current study aimed to solve this issue.
Methods
Following the initiative of the...
Functional network-level alterations in the semantic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (sv-PPA) are relevant to understanding the clinical features and the neural spreading of the pathology. We assessed the effect of neurodegeneration on brain systems reorganization in early sv-PPA, using advanced brain metabolic connectivity approaches. Forty...
There are few available methods for qualitatively evaluating patients with primary progressive aphasia. Commonly adopted approaches are time-consuming, of limited accuracy, or designed to assess different patient populations. This paper introduces a new clinical test - the Mini Linguistic State Examination - which was designed uniquely to enable a...
Concrete conceptual knowledge is supported by a distributed neural network representing different semantic features according to the neuroanatomy of sensory and motor systems. If and how this framework applies to abstract knowledge is currently debated. Here we investigated the specific brain correlates of different abstract categories. After a sys...
Background
The evidence about the language performance profile of multiple system atrophy (MSA) is limited, but its definition may lead to a more comprehensive characterization of the disorder and contribute to clarify the involvement of the basal ganglia in language abilities.
Objective
The objectives of the study were: (1) to evaluate the reliab...
The observation of neurological patients showing selective impairments for specific conceptual categories contributed in the development of semantic memory theories. Here, we studied two patients (P01, P02), affected, respectively, by the semantic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (sv-PPA) and Cortico-Basal Syndrome (CBS). An implicit lexical...
The neuroscientific study of conceptual representation has largely focused on categories of concrete entities (biological entities, tools…), while abstract knowledge has been less extensively investigated. The possible presence of a categorical organization of abstract knowledge is a debated issue. An embodied cognition framework predicts an organi...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fneur.2020.526465.].
The impact of language impairment on the clinical assessment of patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DOC) is unknown or underestimated and may mask the presence of conscious behavior. In a group of DOC patients ( n = 11; time post-injury range: 5–252 months), we investigated the main neural functional and structural underpinnings of...
Objective To investigate the type of errors produced in a picture naming task by patients affected by neurodegenerative dementia due to different etiologies and their neural correlates.
Methods The same standardized picture naming test was administered to a consecutive sample of patients (n = 148) who had been studied with [18F] FDG-PET. The error...
Background: This paper introduces a new clinical test, the Mini Linguistic State Examination (MLSE), as a short assessment for screening and classification of the different manifestations of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Differentiation and monitoring of PPA variants are vital for management, planning and development of new treatments. The MLS...
Syntax is a species-specific component of human language combining a finite set of words in a potentially infinite number of sentences. Since words are by definition expressed by sound, factoring out syntactic information is normally impossible. Here, we circumvented this problem in a novel way by designing phrases with exactly the same acoustic co...
Background
Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) patients present language disturbances in tasks like naming, repetition, reading, word comprehension and semantic association compared to Parkinson’s disease (PD) and healthy controls (HC).
Objective
In the present study we sought to validate a Screening for Aphasia in NeuroDegeneration (SAND) batter...
The neural representation of abstract concepts is a current matter of debate. While social concepts have been associated to superior anterior temporal lobe (sATL), the neural correlates of quantity-related concepts have seldom been investigated. The right intraparietal sulcus (IPS) is known to be involved in the processing of numerical information...
Syntax is a species-specific component of human language combining a finite set of words in a potentially infinite number of sentences. Since words are by definition expressed by sound, factoring out syntactic information is normally impossible. Here, we circumvented this problem in a novel way by designing phrases with exactly the same acoustic co...
Syntax is traditionally defined as a specifically human way to pair sound with meaning: words are assembled in a recursive way generating a potentially infinite set of sentences 1,2 . There can be different phrasal structures depending on the types of words involved, for example, “noun phrases” (NP), combining an article and a noun, vs. “verb phras...
A progressive speech/language disorder, such as the non fluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia and progressive apraxia of speech, can be due to neuropathologically verified Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). The prevalence of linguistic deficits and the linguistic profile in PSP patients who present primarily with a movement di...
According with a featural organization of semantic memory, this work is aimed at investigating, through an attractor network, the role of different kinds of features in the representation of concepts, both in normal and neurodegenerative conditions. We implemented new synaptic learning rules in order to take into account the role of partially share...
Background:
We evaluated the psychometric proprieties of the Screening for Aphasia in NeuroDegeneration (SAND) battery in Italian primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and movement disorder (MD) patients.
Methods:
The sample included 30 consecutive PPA and 45 MD patients who completed the SAND battery together with a clinical interview and a neurolo...
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can be associated with a spectrum of cognitive and behavioural symptoms, but the related patterns of focal cortical atrophy in non-demented ALS patients remain largely unknown. We enrolled 48 non-demented ALS patients and 26 healthy controls for a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment and a magnetic resonan...
Evidence from both neuropsychology and neuroimaging suggests that different types of information are necessary for representing and processing concrete and abstract word meanings. Both abstract and concrete concepts, however, conjointly rely on perceptual, verbal and contextual knowledge, with abstract concepts characterized by low values of imagea...
There is a growing interest in the use of functional imaging to assess brain activity in the absence of behavioural responses in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). In the present study, we applied a hierarchical auditory stimulation paradigm to functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) in a group of long-term DOC adult patients. Brain respo...
Background: Speech and language impairments are the key clinical feature in several neurodegenerative disorders and primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is the syndrome where they are the prominent features. Their accurate and early identification may increase the diagnosis in the clinical setting. This approach may allow a better discrimination betwe...
Language assessment has a critical role in the clinical diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, in particular, in the case of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). The current diagnostic criteria (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011) identify three main variants on the basis of clinical features and patterns of brain atrophy. Widely accepted tools to diagnose...
Language assessment has a crucial role in the clinical diagnosis of several neurodegenerative diseases. The analysis of extended speech production is a precious source of information encompassing the phonetic, phonological, lexico-semantic, morpho-syntactic and pragmatic levels of language organization. The knowledge about the distinctive linguisti...
During picture naming, the ease with which humans generate words is dependent upon the context in which they are named. For instances, naming previously presented items results in facilitation. Instead, naming a picture semantically related to previous items displays persistent interference effects (i.e., cumulative semantic interference, CSI). The...
Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) is a clinical condition characterized by memory impairment in the absence of any other cognitive impairment and is commonly associated with high conversion to Alzheimer's disease. Recent evidence shows that executive functions and selective attention mechanisms could also be impaired in aMCI. In this study,...
We present a clinical-neuroimaging study in a series of patients with a clinical diagnosis of semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), with the aim to provide clinical-functional correlations of the cognitive and behavioral manifestations at the single-subject level.
We performed neuropsychological investigations, 18F-FDG-PET single...
Digital technologies have opened new opportunities for psychological testing, allowing new computerized testing tools to be developed and/or paper and pencil testing tools to be translated to new computerized devices. The question that rises is whether these implementations may introduce some technology-specific effects to be considered in neuropsy...
Supplementary Materials of the paper “Computerized Neuropsychological Assessment in Aging: Testing Efficacy and Clinical Ecology of Different Interfaces” include a self-reported questionnaire administrated to all participants to the study. The questionnaire included 16 items measuring the following participant features: the participant frequency of...
The neuropsychological investigation of semantic memory has mainly focused on concrete concepts, while abstract concepts have been relatively neglected. We describe a new battery for assessing abstract concepts in brain-damaged patients. The battery includes three different tests: an association task, a multiple-choice naming-to-description task an...
Background / Purpose:
In Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), neuroimaging studies have demonstrated a prominent involvement of white matter, encompassing, as key structures, not only the corticospinal tract but also the corpus callosum (CC).The observation of mirror movements was the first evidence of callosal impairment in interhemispheric inhi...
Introduction. There is some evidence that cognitive rehabilitation can delay cognitive and functional decline in healthy older adults and person living with Alzheimer.s disease (AD). Persons living with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) usually retain a wide range of cognitive capacities, and may thus represent an ideal target for cognitive rehabilit...
We report the construction and standardization of a new comprehensive battery of tests for the assessment of semantic memory disorders. The battery is constructed on a common set of 48 stimuli, belonging to both living and non-living categories, rigidly controlled for several confounding variables, and is based on an empirically derived corpus of s...
Introduction:
A distinction has been proposed, on theoretical grounds, between referential and inferential semantic abilities. The former account for the relationship of words to the world, the latter for the relationship of words among themselves. The hypothesis of, at least partially, different neurological underpinnings for this distinction has...
The presence of episodic memory impairment is required for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's dementia by all current diagnostic criteria. The new research criteria proposed by Dubois et al. (Lancet Neurol 6:734-746, 2007) require that the impairment should not improve significantly with cueing, recognition testing nor after the control of effective enco...
Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is an uncommon presentation of Alzheimer's disease (AD), characterised by prevalent anatomo-functional involvement of posterior cortical areas. Accordingly, the main clinical features at onset are disorders of high-order visual processing, such as alexia and impairments of visuo-spatial and visuo-constructional abil...
The main objective of this study is to investigate the abstract-concrete dichotomy by introducing a new variable: the mode of acquisition (MoA) of a concept. MoA refers to the way in which concepts are acquired: through experience, through language, or through both. We asked 250 participants to rate 417 words on seven dimensions: age of acquisition...
Recent activation studies have suggested different neural correlates for processing concrete and abstract words. However, the precise localization is far from being defined. One reason for the heterogeneity of these results could lie in the extreme variability of experimental paradigms, ranging from explicit semantic judgments to lexical decision t...
The organization and representation of conceptual knowledge in the brain remains a controversial issue in terms of both neuropsychological and imaging evidence. We report the results of a functional magnetic resonance study in which the role of the most debated dimensions (domain and feature type) was evaluated through a concept-feature verificatio...
