Sentence comprehension in Parkinson's disease

Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with dementia have impairment of syntactic comprehension. Non-demented PD patients also experience difficulties in sentence comprehension and can be particularly impaired in the processing of grammatical characteristics of syntactically complex sentences.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to verify the performance of PD patients without dementia in a syntactic comprehension task compared with normal elderly.MethodsWe studied oral sentence comprehension in fourteen patients with idiopathic PD together with fourteen controls matched for age and education, using the Token Test and Schmitt’s Syntactic Comprehension Test (developed in Brazilian Portuguese).ResultsFor the Token Test, there was no statistically significant difference between the PD group and the control group, whereas on the Syntactic Comprehension Test there was a slight statistically significant difference between the groups only for relatives in subject clauses (p=0.0407).ConclusionsPD patients differed from controls in the oral comprehension for relatives subject sentences alone. These results did not strictly reproduce those previously reported in the literature, and therefore point to the need for creating tests with diverse syntactic constructions in Portuguese able to produce consistent data regarding language behavior of Brazilian subjects with PD in comprehension tasks.

Sex, dopamine, and hypokinesia: A study of inflectional morphology in Parkinson’s disease.

“…In the remainder of the introduction, we first provide theoretical background for this perspective, and then briefly discuss the existing literature on inflectional morphology in PD, before turning to an overview of the present study. Whereas almost all PD language studies have probed English, with only a few testing other (European) languages (Bocanegra et al, 2015; Colman et al, 2009; Macoir et al, 2013; Penke & Wimmer, 2012; Prieto, Radanovic, Schmitt, Barbosa, & Mansur, 2007; Terzi et al, 2005), we investigated Farsi, the primary language of Iran.…”