1. Discriminating nonfluent/agrammatic and logopenic PPA variants with automatically extracted morphosyntactic measures from connected speech
- Author
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Lukic, Sladjana, Fan, Zekai, García, Adolfo M, Welch, Ariane E, Ratnasiri, Buddhika M, Wilson, Stephen M, Henry, Maya L, Vonk, Jet, Deleon, Jessica, Miller, Bruce L, Miller, Zachary, Mandelli, Maria Luisa, and Gorno-Tempini, Maria Luisa
- Subjects
Biological Psychology ,Psychology ,Neurosciences ,Alzheimer's Disease including Alzheimer's Disease Related Dementias (AD/ADRD) ,Aphasia ,Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) ,Brain Disorders ,Alzheimer's Disease Related Dementias (ADRD) ,Acquired Cognitive Impairment ,Neurodegenerative ,Aging ,Dementia ,Clinical Research ,Humans ,Aphasia ,Primary Progressive ,Speech ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Language ,Atrophy ,Primary progressive aphasia ,Morphosyntax ,Subordination production ,Natural language processing ,Cortical atrophy ,Cognitive Sciences ,Experimental Psychology ,Biological psychology ,Cognitive and computational psychology - Abstract
Morphosyntactic assessments are important for characterizing individuals with nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA). Yet, standard tests are subject to examiner bias and often fail to differentiate between nfvPPA and logopenic variant PPA (lvPPA). Moreover, relevant neural signatures remain underexplored. Here, we leverage natural language processing tools to automatically capture morphosyntactic disturbances and their neuroanatomical correlates in 35 individuals with nfvPPA relative to 10 healthy controls (HC) and 26 individuals with lvPPA. Participants described a picture, and ensuing transcripts were analyzed via part-of-speech tagging to extract sentence-related features (e.g., subordinating and coordinating conjunctions), verbal-related features (e.g., tense markers), and nominal-related features (e.g., subjective and possessive pronouns). Gradient boosting machines were used to classify between groups using all features. We identified the most discriminant morphosyntactic marker via a feature importance algorithm and examined its neural correlates via voxel-based morphometry. Individuals with nfvPPA produced fewer morphosyntactic elements than the other two groups. Such features robustly discriminated them from both individuals with lvPPA and HCs with an AUC of .95 and .82, respectively. The most discriminatory feature corresponded to subordinating conjunctions was correlated with cortical atrophy within the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus across groups (pFWE
- Published
- 2024