Word picture verification performance reveals auditory comprehension deficits in primary progressive aphasia

Word/picture verification has been found to be a sensitive measure of lexical-semantic abilities in post-stroke aphasia and reveals information about disruptions in semantic and phonological processing. Exploration of the nature of auditory comprehension deficits using word/picture verification has not been replicated in primary progressive aphasia (PPA). We tested 108 in-dividuals with PPA [logopenic variant PPA (lvPPA), n = 50; nonfluent agrammatic PPA (nfaPPA), n = 36; semantic variant PPA (svPPA), n = 22] on a spoken word/picture verification task and a spoken word/picture matching task. The spoken word/picture matching task identified 22 (20%) of individuals as impaired, whereas the spoken word/picture verification task identified 51 (47%) of individuals as impaired (two-tailed p < 0.001). Errors on spoken word/picture verification were due to semantic rather than phonologic foils in lvPPA (nouns, p < 0.001; verbs, p < 0.001), svPPA (nouns, p < 0.001; verbs, p < 0.001), and for nouns (p = 0.001) but not verbs in nfaPPA. Spoken word/picture verification was a more sensitive measure of single-word auditory comprehension deficits in PPA than word/picture matching. The error pattern, consistent with the distributed model of semantic knowledge, suggests that degradation of semantic represen-tations for both nouns and verbs can occur in lvPPA, which may help to distinguish lvPPA versus nfaPPA and guide treatment for anomia.