Another patient has dysnomia, effortful speech, and impaired repetition and comprehension for complex sentences.

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Multiple Choice

Another patient has dysnomia, effortful speech, and impaired repetition and comprehension for complex sentences.

This pattern highlights the logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia. The combination of word-finding difficulties (dysnomia) with slow, hesitant, effortful speech and a notable drop in repetition points to problems with the phonological working memory system—holding and manipulating sounds long enough to reproduce them. In logopenic aphasia, repetition is particularly impaired because the phonological loop is weakened, and comprehension of longer or more complex sentences can suffer as processing relies on maintaining material in working memory during interpretation. Grammar and single-word understanding tend to be relatively preserved early, which helps distinguish this from other PPA types. Semantic dementia would typically show fluent speech but profound deficits in word meaning and single-word comprehension, not mainly a repetition and complex-sentence comprehension problem. Progressive nonfluent aphasia usually features nonfluency with apraxia of speech and agrammatism, with repetition impaired largely due to speech production deficits rather than phonological working memory.

This pattern highlights the logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia. The combination of word-finding difficulties (dysnomia) with slow, hesitant, effortful speech and a notable drop in repetition points to problems with the phonological working memory system—holding and manipulating sounds long enough to reproduce them. In logopenic aphasia, repetition is particularly impaired because the phonological loop is weakened, and comprehension of longer or more complex sentences can suffer as processing relies on maintaining material in working memory during interpretation. Grammar and single-word understanding tend to be relatively preserved early, which helps distinguish this from other PPA types. Semantic dementia would typically show fluent speech but profound deficits in word meaning and single-word comprehension, not mainly a repetition and complex-sentence comprehension problem. Progressive nonfluent aphasia usually features nonfluency with apraxia of speech and agrammatism, with repetition impaired largely due to speech production deficits rather than phonological working memory.

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