Clinical Assessment of Primary Progressive Aphasia with the Mini Linguistic State Examination

Abstract

This paper describes the motivation, methodology and findings of a collaborative project that led to the production of the first two versions of the Mini Linguistic State Examination (MLSE).　Chief among the motivations for the work was the need for a quick, simple and quantitative clinical test of linguistic cognition that could capture the varied phenotypes of progressive aphasia and improve the consistency with which individual patients are classified by clinicians.　We were also fascinated by the possibility of comparing the performance of such an instrument by speakers of two different languages (English and Italian) which, although typologically close, present a number of important contrasts.　Researchers interested in PPA have since created parallel versions of the instrument in 12 further languages, including Japanese.　Comparison of the final forms taken by each of these versions and the ways in which the individual subtests are varied to exploit the idiosyncracies of the language they are testing may itself yield new insights into both the clinical spectrum of primary progressive aphasia and the biological basis of language itself.