Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) refers to a neurological syndrome in which the language functions of individuals progressively degenerate. There are three common subtypes of PPA: semantic variant PPA (svPPA), nonfluent/agrammatic PPA (naPPA), and the logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA).

svPPA is a fluent type of aphasia accompanied by naming difficulty and deficits of word and object meaning with seemingly compromised long-term memory. naPPA is characterized by slowed, difficult, non-fluent speech with poor use of grammatical features. lvPPA is marked by problems with the phonological loop system in working memory models. lvPPA patients may suffer from symptoms that overlap with svPPA and naPPA, leading to difficulty in diagnosing lvPPA and characterizing its prominent production errors.

This study analyzes the errors of PPA patients through Place-Voice-Manner (PVM) analysis of productions from the Western Aphasia Battery Naming Task. We predicted that PPA patients would produce errors most closely related to their given diagnosis, and our results confirm this prediction. The most common lvPPA errors were place errors, followed by manner errors, and then finally voicing errors. svPPA and naPPA patient, however, both produced errors that followed the frequency pattern of manner, followed by place, and finally voicing. Practical implications of these findings include fine-tuning therapies and treatments to help patients preserve language skills as well as assisting caretakers with disease progression. In order to improve data accuracy, larger populations and statistical analyses are needed in future testing.