(No abstract is available for this citation).

Primary progressive aphasia is a clinical syndrome in which patients progressively lose speech and language abilities. Three variants are recognized: logopenic, associated with phonology and/or short-term verbal memory deficits accompanied by left temporo-parietal atrophy; semantic, associated with semantic deficits and anterior temporal lobe atrophy; non-fluent associated with grammar and/or speech-motor deficits and inferior frontal gyrus atrophy. Here, we set out to investigate whether the three variants of PPA can be dissociated based on error patterns in a single language task. We (...) recruited 21 lvPPA, 28 svPPA, and 24 nfvPPA patients, together with 31 healthy controls, and analyzed their performance on an auditory noun-to-verb generation task, which requires auditory analysis of the input, access to and selection of relevant lexical and semantic knowledge, as well as preparation and execution of speech. Task accuracy differed across the three variants and controls, with lvPPA and nfvPPA having the lowest and highest accuracy, respectively. Critically, machine learning analysis of the different error types yielded above-chance classification of patients into their corresponding group. An analysis of the error types revealed clear variant-specific effects: lvPPA patients produced the highest percentage of “not-a-verb” responses and the highest number of semantically related nouns ; in contrast, svPPA patients produced the highest percentage of “unrelated verb” responses and the highest number of light verbs. Taken together, our findings indicate that error patterns in an auditory verb generation task are associated with the breakdown of different neurocognitive mechanisms across PPA variants. Specifically, they corroborate the link between temporo-parietal regions with lexical processing, as well as ATL with semantic processes. These findings illustrate how the analysis of pattern of responses can help PPA phenotyping and heighten diagnostic sensitivity, while providing insights on the neural correlates of different components of language. (shrink)

Alison Denham examines the ways in which our engagement with literary art, and metaphorical discourse in particular, informs our moral beliefs. She considers to what extent moral and metaphorical discourses are capable of truth or falsehood, warrant or justification, and how it is that we understand these discourses. This vital new study offers a fresh view of the nature of the moral and the metaphorical, and the relations between art and morality.

Both the author and the date of this five-volume poem, the first Western document to link the houses of the zodiac with the course of human affairs, are uncertain. The author's name may be Marcus Manilius, or Manlius, or Mallius, and the latest datable event mentioned in the books themselves is the disastrous defeat of Varus' Roman legions by the German tribes in 9 CE. The writing shows knowledge of the work of Lucretius, but the work is not referred to (...) by any subsequent writer, suggesting that it was never widely disseminated. A manuscript was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416 or 1417, and editions were produced by Scaliger and Bentley, but this immensely erudite edition of 1903–1930 by the scholar and poet A. E. Housman is regarded as authoritative. Volume 2 describes the signs of the zodiac, their characteristics and their subdivisions. (shrink)