Patients With Aphasia Use Different Cognitive Tools To Compensate For Language Deficits

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Study Illuminates Trade-Off Between Complex Words and Complex Sentences:

Widespread public attention was brought to the neurological condition aphasia by Bruce Willis's recent announcement that he was retiring from acting. While just about everyone struggles occasionally with finding the right word or tripping over their sentences, aphasia patients can lose the ability to comprehend language entirely.

Though Willis hasn't confirmed it, some doctors suspect that he may have an especially brutal and degenerative form called primary progressive aphasia (PPA).

Scientists have long understood that there are several subtypes of PPA. While some versions come with lexical deficits, affecting a person's ability to access words, others cause syntactic deficits, making it difficult to construct sentences.

Cognitive scientists and doctors from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), working as a collaborative team, have now developed a quantitative way to identify these different deficits. In the process, they illuminated a fundamental trade-off the brain makes when speaking between grammar and vocabulary. Their findings show that PPA patients with grammar deficits use richer, more complex vocabulary to compensate for their syntax struggles and vice versa.

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