Paraphasia and Related Disorders in Primary Degenerative Dementia.

A confrontation naming task administered to 12 cases of primary degenerative dementia resulted in (1) semantic verbal paraphasia exhibiting a rather consistent tendency to occur in cases with mild word finding difficulty, whereas semantically unrelated paraphasia was produced in cases with almost every grade of severity of naming impairment. (2) The portion occupied by verbal paraphasia as a whole in the total quantity of speech output tended rather to diminish in proportion of naming difficulty in favour of increasing amount of empty pharases, circumlocutions, and commenting speech. (3) About half of the cases exhibited a remarkable naming behaviour in word finding with aid of the initial syllable of a target word given as an auditory cue, producing a definite amount of phonemic paraphasia (often neologism) and formal nominal aphasia that were only exceptionally observed in 2 representative cases of fluent aphasia of vascular origin whereas in simple naming (without cue) predominantly verbal paraphasia was elicited in both groups. It suggests a hitherto unnoticed qualitative difference, probably in the phonological aspect, of word finding difficulty between dementia patients and aphasics with focal brain damage