Tonal and orthographic analysis in a Cantonese-speaking individual with nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia

ABSTRACT

Clinical understanding of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) has been established based on English-speaking population. The lack of linguistic diversity in research hinders the diagnosis of PPA in non-English speaking patients. This case report describes the tonal and orthographic deficits of a multilingual native Cantonese-speaking woman with nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA (nfvPPA) and progressive supranuclear palsy. Our findings suggest that Cantonese-speaking nfvPPA patients exhibit tone production impairments, tone perception deficits at the lexical selection processing, and linguistic dysgraphia errors unique to logographic script writer. These findings suggest that linguistic tailored approaches offer novel and effective tools in identifying non-English speaking PPA individuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Primary progressive aphasia
• tone
• logographic script
• orthography

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants and their families for their contributions to this work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Financial support and sponsorship

The work is supported by the Global Brain Health Institute, University of California, San Francisco, National Institutes of Health (NINDS R01 NS050915, NIDCD K24 DC015544, NIDCD R01 DC016291, NIA U01 AG052943, NIA P50 AG023501, NIA P01 AG019724, R01 AG038791, U01 AG045390, U54 NS092089), Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center of California (03-75271 DHS/ADP/ARCC); Larry L. Hillblom Foundation (2013-A-029-SUP and 2005/2T); John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation; Koret Family Foundation; Consortium for Frontotemporal Dementia Research; and McBean Family Foundation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Global Brain Health Institute, Alzheimer’s Association, Alzheimer’s Society Pilot Award for Global Brain Health Leaders [GBHI ALZ UK-19-589586].