Language and Parkinson's Disease

Abstract

Parkinson's disease, the most common progressive neurological movement disorder worldwide, causes slow deterioration of subcortical structures and dopamine deficiency, and the disruption of circuits connecting frontal lobe and basal ganglia regions. Although the motor and cognitive consequences of these structural and physiological changes have been well-documented, only a limited, albeit growing, empirical literature has examined the integrity of language abilities in individuals with Parkinson's disease. This article reviews recent advances in that literature that have furthered our understanding of the quantitative and qualitative changes in morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic, and discourse levels of language functioning associated with Parkinson's disease. This article also discusses the theoretical and applied implications of these linguistic symptoms and provides suggestions to forward this line of research.

Sentence Comprehension and Its Association with Executive Functions in Patients with Parkinson's Disease

“…However, this impairment was fairly mild, consistent with earlier reports [4, 5]. Additionally, cognitive functions other than sentence comprehension were also relatively intact.…”

Linguistic Complexity, Speech Production, and Comprehension in Parkinson’s Disease: Behavioral and Physiological Indices

“…Studies focusing on semantic, syntactic, and prosodic aspects of language, collectively, suggest that 50%–60% of individuals with PD without dementia have a mild-to-moderate impairment in their language comprehension, even in the earlier stages of the disease (for reviews, see Grossman, 1999; Lieberman, 2000; Murray, 2008). With respect to spoken language, Illes, Metter, Hanson, and Iritani (1988) and Cummings, Darkins, Mendez, Hill, and Benson (1988) elicited speech samples from individuals with mild-to-moderate PD and found reduced utterance length and syntactic complexity compared with controls.…”

The effects of subthalamic deep brain stimulation on metaphor comprehension and language abilities in Parkinson’s disease

“…Many PD patients may also present cognitive symptoms including executive dysfunctions (e.g., working memory, mental flexibility and inhibition deficits) (Owen et al, 1992;Verbaan et al, 2007) and language impairments (e.g., verbal fluency and pragmatic deficits) (Monetta, Grindod, & Pell, 2009;Murray, 2008;Pell & Monetta, 2008;Vachon-Joannette, Tremblay, Langlois, Chantal, & Monetta, 2013). Pragmatic language such as metaphor comprehension is often impaired in PD, probably because it requires high-level language and cognitive abilities (McKinlay, Dalrymple-Alford, Grace, & Roger, 2009;Monetta & Pell, 2007).…”