Some readings on the phonetics of neurodegenerative diseases

This semester, two researchers from Murray Grossman's lab -- Sherry Ash and Naomi Nevler -- will be participating in this course. They are interested in applying corpus-phonetics techniques to the analysis of several bodies of speech data collected from patients and controls over a period of years. The first source they'll be analyzing is the result of asking subjects to describe a drawing, known as the "Cookie Theft" picture: they have classified and transcribed 474 such recordings. Later on, they hope to apply similar techniques to "Frog Story" narratives.

Here is some helpful background from Sherry:

Please find attached a selection of papers from our lab on aspects of language in a variety of neurodegenerative conditions: frontotemporal degeneration, Lewy body spectrum disorder (including various stages of Parkinson's disease and Lewy body disease), and ALS (amyotrophic lateral scelerosis, also called motor neuron (or neurone) disease, also called Lou Gehrig's disease).  The first, FTD, is generally seen as comprising three variants: a nonfluent/agrammatic, aphasic variant; a semantic, aphasic variant; and a non-aphasic, behavioral/executive variant.  Current terminology labels these respectively as naPPA, svPPA, and bvFTD. The "PPA" part means "primary progressive aphasia."  This terminology for the PPA variants dates from 2011, with the publication of new classification criteria.  Before that (and still, in many publications), naPPA was called PNFA for "progressive nonfluent aphasia" and svPPA was called SD or SemD for "semantic dementia."  bvFTD used to be called a Soc/Exec variant (social/executive) of FTD, but it's almost universally called bvFTD now.  You can observe the evolution of the terminology in these articles.

All these papers use Frog Story as the source of data except for the 2013 paper.  That one provides a comparison of Frog Story and Cookie Theft speech; we made it in order to determine whether the much shorter speech sample elicited by the Cookie Theft protocol was an accurate representation of an individual's speech as compared to Frog Story.

The papers:

S. Ash et al., "Trying to tell a tale", Neurology 2006
S. Ash et al., "Non-fluent speech in frontotemporal lobar degeneration", Journal of Neurolinguistics 2009
S. Ash et al., "Speech errors in progressive non-fluent aphasia", Brain & Language 2010
S. Ash et al., "The organization of narrative discourse in Lewy body spectrum disorder", Brain & Language 2011
S. Ash et al., "Differentiating primary progressive aphasias in a brief sample of connected speech", Neurology 2013
S. Ash et al., "Deficits in sentence expression in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis", Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Frontotemporal Degeneration 2014
S. Ash et al., "Narrative discourse deficits in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis", Neurology 2014