• 재활복지
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.45-65
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• 2016

The purposes of this study were to determine recent trends of domestic and international studies for primary progressive aphasia (PPA) patient group and to identify areas for future research. For these purposes, 171 studies on communication disorders of a PPA were chosen and sub-categories for research methods and contents were also analyzed. The sub-categories for research methods include types of research subject, research purpose and research field. As the research subject, 'agrammatism' was most frequently dealt with in both domestic and international studies; as the research purpose, 'characteristics study' accounted for the largest portion; and with respect to the research field, the international studies have covered evenly language, speech and others, while the domestic studies have handled only the field of 'language,' paying no attention to 'speech' and 'others.' In the international studies, apraxia of speech was added to the conventional three sub-types of PPA classification, so distinction between the four symptoms has been actively studied; however, patient cases were difficult to find in Korea, so the symptoms the patients had, although centering around communication disorders, have been rarely researched in the domestic studies. The results suggested that there have been extremely few studies related and their research field has lacked diversity. We suggested a direction for future research on communication disorders with PPA.