Jargonaphasia: A Systematic Overview and Characterization in Primary Progressive Aphasia

This study provides a literature-based overview of jargonaphasia in primary progressive aphasias (PPA) exploring its occurrence, phenotypes, and anatomical underpinnings, while adding 2 novel cases with prototypical jargon. We report 26 jargonaphasia cases, initially diagnosed with semantic or logopenic PPA, resulting in semantic or phonological jargon, respectively. Brain damage in literature and our cases encompassed superior temporal cortices involved in language monitoring, the temporal-parietal junction for phonological jargon and temporal poles for semantic jargon. Our findings show that jargonaphasia is an infrequent language feature in PPA, comprises exclusively semantic and phonological jargon related to semantic and logopenic PPA, whereas no syntactic jargon case was identified in nonfluent/agrammatic PPA. Our outcomes allow for classifying jargonaphasic patients within the spectrum of PPA variants, thus providing indicators of the underlying neuropathology.