Cognitive linguistic deficits in relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis

Abstract

Background: Recent years have witnessed increasing reports of language dysfunction associated with the neuropathology of multiple sclerosis (MS). Although linguistic compromise is not traditionally thought to be a significant clinical manifestation of MS, a number of published case and group reports have uncovered the presence of higher-level language and isolated general language deficits in samples of patients with both chronic progressive and relapsing-remitting (RR) subtypes of the disease. To the present day however, the precise nature and extent of a language compromise in MS remains largely controversial and unclear. Aims: The present study aims to profile the cognitive linguistic abilities of a cohort of fifteen RR-subtype MS patients against an age-and education-matched group of neurologically normal control participants. Methods & Procedures: MS participants were assessed using a comprehensive battery of cognitive linguistic assessments targeting general and higher-level language behaviours. Outcomes & Results:The results revealed reduced performance on higher-level language subtests including: listening comprehension (making inferences), oral expression (recreating sentences), semantic absurdities and definitions. For the general language behaviours, a reduced performance was found for spontaneously elicited speech, repetition and naming. Conclusions: The findings are suggestive of both expressive language and higher-level language dysfunction in RR subtype MS and highlight deficits in linguistic organisation, retrieval mechanisms and semantic manipulation and processing.

Grammatical Class Effects Across Impaired Child and Adult Populations

“…Simultaneous activation of more than one lemma for the target action word to evoke selecting the single, correct target verb was difficult for all LI groups. This ties in with reports that, on the one hand, many LI groups have difficulties strategically searching and selecting a word from the lexicon from among many competitors, including individuals with SCZ (Elvevåg et al, 2001 ), RRMS (Barwood and Murdoch, 2013 ), and SLI (Mainela-Arnold et al, 2010 ) and that, on the other hand, verbs are particularly vulnerable (Marvel et al, 2004 ; Woods et al, 2007 ). In this case, verbs provoked significantly more semantic circumlocutions or descriptions than nouns for most LI groups (see Table 5 above).…”

“…In contrast, the SCZ and the RRMS groups presented with a mild naming impairment for nouns and verbs. It is worth noting that lexical retrieval deficits are not traditionally assumed to be a significant language symptom of multiple sclerosis or schizophrenic profiles and have thus not received much attention by researchers (see Barwood and Murdoch, 2013 ). However, it is possible that poor naming of nouns and/or verbs may be a marker of incipient cognitive decline for both multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia, with the effect larger for verbs compared to nouns, and that common cognitive-linguistic testing is not sensitive or specific enough to capture this linguistic phenomenon.…”

“…For spoken naming, representation of the sound of the word is activated in the phonological output lexicon, then stored in the phonological assembly buffer from where instructions are given to the sensory-motor system to coordinate and produce speech sounds (e.g., /sped/ or /′dıg(ıη)/). Picture naming is considered a task with low selection demand (i.e., one specific word is retrieved from memory), given that there is a single dominant response, and usually interpreted as a general (low-level) language outcome measure in acquired language impairments (Barwood and Murdoch, 2013 ).…”

Morphosyntactic Abilities and Cognitive Performance in Multiple Sclerosis

“…This is so because existing words, which belong to common groups, are easier to retrieve and pronounce [ 57 ]. Additionally, naming errors and dysarthria, which is often observed in this population [ 58 , 59 ], may also contribute to the worse performance in non-word repetition.…”