Clinical and neuropsychological features of the primary progressive aphasia variants (adapted from Woollacott et al, 2016)46
| Semantic variant PPA | Nonfluent variant PPA | Logopenic variant PPA | |
| Spontaneous speech (fluency, errors, grammar, prosody) | Fluent, garrulous and circumlocutory, semantic errors, intact grammar and prosody | Slow and hesitant, Effortful +/-apraxic, phonetic errors, may be agrammatic, aprosodic | Hesitant, not effortful or apraxic, frequent word-finding pauses and loss of train of sentence, intact grammar and prosody |
| Naming | Severe anomia with semantic paraphasias | Moderate anomia with phonetic errors and phonemic paraphasias | Mild-to-moderate anomia with occasional phonemic paraphasias |
| Single word comprehension | Poor | Intact early on, but affected later in the disease | Intact early on, but affected later in the disease |
| Sentence comprehension | Initially preserved, later on becomes affected as word comprehension is impaired | Impaired if grammatically complex | Impaired, especially if long |
| Single word repetition | Relatively intact | Mild-to-moderately impaired if polysyllabic | Relatively intact (compared with sentence repetition) |
| Sentence repetition | Relatively intact | Can be effortful, impaired if grammatically complex | Impaired, with length effect |
| Reading | Surface dyslexia | Phonological dyslexia +/-phonetic errors on reading aloud | Phonological dyslexia |
| Writing | Surface dysgraphia | Phonological dysgraphia | Phonological dysgraphia |
PPA, primary progressive aphasia.