Concrete and abstract concepts processing in semantic variant?Progressive Primary Aphasia.

MARTINEZ CUITIÑO, M.; BOROVINSKY, G.; PONTELLO, NOELIA; FORMOSO, J.; FERRARI, J; FACUNDO MANES; SORIANO, FEDERICO; SEDEÑO, L.; BARREYRO, J. P.

Conferencia; 11th International Conference on Frontotemporal Dementias; 2018

Semantic variant Primary Progressive Aphasia (sv-PPA) is characterized by progressive affectation of semantic memory. One of the principal symptoms is the breakdown of lexical conceptual knowledge. Dissociations between concrete and abstract concepts have been reported. The effect frequently found in patients is a concreteness effect (EC): a better performance with concrete than with abstract concepts. The EC is frequently explained by the higher semantic richness of concrete concepts. Nonetheless, the most frequently reported effect in sv-PPA patients is an inverse concreteness effect: a better performance with abstract concepts. The aim of this work was to compare the performance of 8 sv-PPA patients to a group of 20 healthy controls, using a synonyms task (ST). Both groups were matched in age (t(26)=1.390;p=.176) and education (t(26)=1.012;p=.321). ST includes 30 pairs of synonyms: 20 pairs of nouns and 10 pairs of verbs. Half the stimuli are of high concreteness and the other half, low concreteness. An ANOVA (2x2x2) was carried out, considering group as intersubject variable (vs-PPA vs. controls) and the concreteness (high vs. low) and grammatical category (nouns vs. verbs) as intrasubject variables. Analysis showed that the distribution was similar to normality (K-S=1.33,p=.06), but their variances were different (F(1,110)=30.47,p