Participation in the standardization and validation processes of the GREMOTs : Study of repetition among the normal population and within primary progressive aphasias

Abstract

The GREMOTs is an evaluation’s battery of the language pertaining to neurodegenerative pathologies, regarding the methodological limitations of other tools used in clinical practice. While participating to its normalisation and validation, we have studied normal aging effects (control subjects (CS)) and pathological aging effects (patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA)) on words, sentences and non-words repetitions. We have thought upon the potential effect of social and demographic variables (gender, social status (SS) and age) as well as psycholinguistics' (length, concreteness and item category) on repetition performances on CS and a difference of performances depending on the PPA type. Our analysis is based upon a sample of 445 control subjects, 26 patients (15 logopenics, 7 agrammatic non-fluents and 4 semantics) and their 130 matched SC. The results show a significant effect of the SS on words repetition, a significant effect of the gender, the SS and the concreteness on sentences repetition, a significant effect of the SS and the item category on the non-words and an effect of the age factor on the logatoms. Moreover, the GREMOTs words and sentences repetition tests are sensitive, in the sense that they allow distinguishing of normal aging effects versus pathological's, but non-specific, considering their inability to distinguish PPA types (repetition of non-words being only sensitive and specific to logopenic patients). Then again, the semantics PPA repetition performances are in deficit contrary to what are claiming Gorno-Tempini and al. criteria’s (2011).