Primary Progressive Aphasia: Semantic Variant and the Loss of Humor Understanding

This thesis explores the concept of aphasia, a complex language disorder that can arise either from brain damage or neurodegenerative conditions, with a specific focus on Primary Progressive Aphasia or PPA. The first section examines aphasia, defining its major characteristics and subtypes, that can stem from cerebral strokes, infections, brain injuries and tumors, explained within the major aphasia models. It then focuses on aphasia due to dementia, specifically PPA, with its variants and diagnosis. One of the three variants of PPA, the semantic variant (svPPA), is better explored in the second section. Here, particular attention is given to differential diagnosis and distinction between svPPA and other conditions— such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), Wernicke’s aphasia and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). The link between svPPA and humor impairment is precisely discussed in this section, considering humor alteration not as an isolated feature, but rather as a part of a broad disruption of semantic knowledge, highlighting the progressive difficulty these patients have in understanding symbolic and socially nuanced language. This helps illustrate how svPPA affects not only language, but also everyday communication and social functioning. Lastly, the final section focuses on a few treatments that the research has identified so far, including speech therapy, cognitive rehabilitation, and neuroimaging techniques. This thesis concludes by highlighting some directions for future research (e.g. anendophasia), emphasizing the need for personalized therapeutic strategies to enhance communication with and quality of life of affected individuals.