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Jargon aphasia is a language disorder characterised by phonological and nonword error.\ud Errors are thought to arise when target segments are insufficiently activated, allowing non-target or recently used phonology to intrude. Words which are more frequent and familiar reside with greater degrees of activation and therefore should be less susceptible to error. The current study tested this hypothesis in a group of ten people with Jargon aphasia using single word repetition and reading aloud. Each task had two lexicality conditions, one high and one low lexical availability word set. Measures of nonword quantity, phonological accuracy and perseveration were used in group and case series analyses. Results demonstrated that fewer nonwords were produced when lexical availability was greater. However, lexicality effects on phonological accuracy and perseveration were only observed in repetition in a sub-group of moderately impaired individuals, demonstrating that lexical information does not consistently influence phonological processing in Jargon aphasia.

Background: Severe word production difficulties remain one of the most challenging clinical symptoms to treat in individuals with jargon aphasia. Clinically, it is important to determine why some individuals with jargon aphasia improve following therapy when others do not. We report a therapy study with AM, an individual with severe neologistic jargon aphasia, and provide a subsequent comparison to previous cases, with the purpose of informing both our theoretical and clinical understanding of jargon aphasia. \ud Aims: This research aimed to investigate AM’s locus of word production deficit and determine the effectiveness of Phonological Component Analysis (PCA) therapy, a phonological cueing therapy, in the re-learning and generalization of naming responses for words. In addition, AM’s performance in therapy, linguistic profile, and ability to engage with therapy/cues were compared in a retrospective analysis with the background linguistic and therapy data of two other individuals with jargon aphasia (P9, Leonard et al., 2008; FF, Bose, 2013), who responded differentially to PCA. This was undertake to explore possible prognostic indicators of phonological therapy for jargon aphasia.\ud Methods and Procedures: A battery of linguistic and neuropsychological tests was used to identify AM’s word production deficit. A single-subject multiple probe design across behaviours was employed to evaluate the effects of PCA therapy on the re-learning and generalization of naming responses. In the retrospective analysis of AM, P9 and FF, we compared differences and similarities in performance on various linguistic tasks, the ability to engage in therapy (i.e., ability to generate and utilize the cues), as well as to retain and maintain cues. \ud Outcomes and Results: AM’s locus of deficit was identified in the mapping between semantics and phonology. PCA was found to be effective in improving naming in two of the three treated word lists during the treatment phase; however, these gains were not maintained. Generalization to untreated picture names was not observed. Findings from the retrospective analysis illustrated that oral reading skills, ability to segment phonological information from words and active engagement with provided cues are likely prerequisites for obtaining robust and long-term gains.\ud Conclusions and Implications: We demonstrated that phonological therapy could be beneficial for the remediation of naming abilities at least in the re-learning phase; however, maintenance and generalization of these gains were limited. This research helps to elucidate the considerations and evaluations necessary for the appropriateness of phonological therapy and candidacy of individuals with jargon aphasia for this treatment approach.

Creating non-word lists is a necessary but time consuming exercise often needed when conducting behavioural language tasks involving lexical decision-making or non-word reading. The following article describes the process whereby we created a list of 226 non-words matching 226 of the Snodgrass picture set (Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980).The non-words were matched for number of syllables, stress pattern, number of phonemes, bigram count and presence and location of the target sound when relevant.

Severe word production difficulties remain one of the most challenging clinical symptoms to treat in individuals with jargon aphasia (JA). Although research has found a beneficial effect of phonological therapy in JA (e.g., FF in Bose 2013; GF in Robson et al., 1998), a lack of improvement in naming performance following this approach has also been reported (e.g., P9 in Leonard et al., 2008). Clinically, it is important to determine why some individuals with JA improve following phonological therapy when others do not. This research investigates the effect of phonological therapy on naming performance in JA and explores possible reasons for improvement or lack thereof (e.g., input/ output processing skills, ability to use and maintain cues). Methods Participant: AM, an 86 year old, English-speaking male, was 16 years post-stroke and presented with persistent, severe neologistic jargon, characterized by very high proportions of non-words and perseverations. Part 1: Effects of phonological cuing (initial phoneme) vs. semantic cuing (semantically-related item) on naming performance were tested on items from the Philadelphia Naming Test (Roach et al., 1996) to determine the most suitable course of therapy. Part 2: Using a single-subject multiple baseline design, Phonological Component Analysis (Leonard et al., 2008) was administered for three sets of words. In addition to analysis of therapy performance, naming accuracy was compared across three lists in three instances of a word being treated (i.e., 1st attempt without any phonological cues, 2nd attempt immediately after the phonological cues, and 3rd attempt after review of the phonological cues). Results and Discussion Part 1: Results showed a significant increase in naming accuracy following phonological cuing [χ2 (1) = 5.782, p = .01], whereas semantic cuing did not [χ2 (1) =.386, ns], thus motivating the implementation of a phonological therapy. Part 2: There was a significant difference in accuracy (%) between treatment (Mdn = 10.00) and baseline (Mdn = 30.00) overall [U = 109.00, z = -3.51, p < .001]; however, performance varied between word sets, with the first two sets showing improvement, but not the third. Notably, therapy gains tended to revert back to pre-therapy accuracy levels towards the end of the therapy phases, as well as when it was discontinued. We investigated whether the drop in performance was mediated by AM’s ability to utilize the phonological cues provided during therapy. AM’s performance on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd naming attempts were 25%, 46% and 36%, respectively, in contrast to participant FF’s 71%, 82% and 94% (Bose, 2013). These results along with findings from part 1 indicate that AM was able to receive and utilize phonological cues in the short term, but unable to retain this benefit for a slightly longer period. This highlights that even for individuals responding well to phonological cues, retention of these benefits is essential for long-term gains. We discuss reasons for differing therapy outcomes between JA individuals, and how therapy context can be used to test theoretical assumptions about the underlying mechanisms of non-word production, and the means by which these change (Nickels et al., 2010). References Bose, A. (2013). Phonological naming therapy in jargon aphasia with neologisms: effects on picture naming and neologisms. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 48, 582-595. Nickels, L. et al. (2010). An untapped resource: Treatment as a tool for revealing the nature of cognitive processes. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 27, 539-562. Roach, A., Schwartz, M. F., Martin, N., Grewal, R.S., & Brecher, A. (1996). The Philadelphia Naming Test: Scoring and Rationale. Aphasiology, 24, 121-133. Robson, J., Marshall, J., Pring, T., & Chiat, S. (1998). Phonological naming in jargon aphasia: Positive but paradoxical effects. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 4, 675-686. Leonard, C., Rochon, E., & Laird, L. (2008). Treating naming impairments in aphasia: Findings from a phonological component analysis treatment. Aphasiology, 22, 923-947.

We present an intuitive geometric approach for analysing the structure and fragility of T1-weighted structural MRI scans of human brains. Apart from computing characteristics like the surface area and volume of regions of the brain that consist of highly active voxels, we also employ Network Theory in order to test how close these regions are to breaking apart. This analysis is used in an attempt to automatically classify subjects into three categories: Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment and healthy controls, for the CADDementia Challenge.

Recent studies showed that features extracted from brain MRIs can well discriminate Alzheimer’s disease from Mild Cognitive Impairment. This study provides an algorithm that sequentially applies advanced feature selection methods for findings the best subset of features in terms of binary classification accuracy. The classifiers that provided the highest accuracies, have been then used for solving a multi-class problem by the one-versus-one strategy. Although several approaches based on Regions of Interest (ROIs) extraction exist, the prediction power of features has not yet investigated by comparing filter and wrapper techniques. The findings of this work suggest that (i) the IntraCranial Volume (ICV) normalization can lead to overfitting and worst the accuracy prediction of test set and (ii) the combined use of a Random Forest-based filter with a Support Vector Machines-based wrapper, improves accuracy of binary classification.