Afasia primária progressiva, afasia de Wernicke, defeito cognitivo ligeiro

: análise das competências semânticas

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing and comparing the changes in Primary Progressive
Aphasia in its Semantic memory variant (PPA-S), in Wernicke's Aphasia (WA) and
in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) all at the level of semantic understanding. It
also aims at answering the guiding question of whether semantic changes in PPA - S patients points out to a different access path to semantic knowledge when compared with WA patients and MCI patients. This comparative-descriptive study has analyzed six patients aged between 51 and 86 years, literate and with no severe visual or hearing deficits, divided into three groups of two patients for each pathology. Six tests of semantic understanding were administrated with semantic decision tasks in sentences, tests of similarities, of association and lexical decision, of categorization and of understanding of idioms and proverbs. The results suggest that patients with PPA deficits showed more semantic deficits than WA patients or MCI patients, and they seem to have a different access to the semantic processing with partial degradation of conceptual knowledge. By WA patients the semantic deficits are a consequence of changes occurring in the access to that knowledge while the memory defects in MCI patients showed no impact, neither at the language level nor in semantic knowledge.

Date of Award	2014
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Ana Margarida Abrantes (Supervisor) & Maria Gabriela Leal (Co-Supervisor)