Sentence Comprehension in Alzheimer's Disease

Progressive aphasia secondary to Alzheimer disease vs FTLD pathology

“…Second, neuropsychological testing is more sensitive to language impairment in AD subjects than bedside cognitive or mental status testing. Hence all subjects with AD regardless of presenting features have language impairment as suggested 42,44 , but on routine evaluation the language impairment is being overshadowed by the memory loss. Therefore, it may not be the language deficits that make our aphasia with AD group standout, but rather it is the absence of prominent episodic memory loss and visual perceptual deficits.…”

“…Language impairment including confrontation naming 42 and sentence comprehension 44 has been demonstrated in typical AD subjects. Our subjects with typical AD had formal testing of language and indeed performance in confrontation naming, semantic fluency, and sentence comprehension were below average similar to our progressive aphasia with AD subjects.…”

Sentence Repetition and Processing Resources in Alzheimer's Disease

“…More recent research, however, has reported declines in AD patients' syntactic processing abilities (Bickel et al, 2000;Emery, 1985;Grossman et al, 1995Grossman et al, , 1998Kemper, 1997;Kemper et al, 1993;Lyons et al, 1994;Small, Andersen, & Kempler, 1997;Small, Kemper, & Lyons, 1997). These studies provide evidence that AD patients have particular difficulty constructing and interpreting sentences with more complex syntactic structures.…”

“…Investigations of sentence-processing ability in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have proliferated in the recent research literature (Bickel, Pantel, Eysenbach & Schröder, 2000;Grossman, Mickanin, Onishi, & Hughes, 1995;Grossman & White-Devine, 1998;Kemper, 1997;Kemper et al, 1993;Kempler, Almor, Tyler, Andersen, & MacDonald, 1998;Lyons et al, 1994;MacDonald, Almor, Kempler, Andersen, & Tyler, 1996;Rochon, Waters, & Caplan, 1994;Small, Andersen, & Kempler, 1997;Small, Kemper, & Lyons, 1997;Small, Lyons, & Kemper, 1996;Waters & Caplan, 1997;Waters, Caplan, & Rochon, 1995;Waters, Rochon, & Caplan, 1998). The interest in syntactic abilities has been generated, in part, by the apparent discrepancy in AD patients' processing in syntactic versus lexical-semantic domains.…”

“…''postinterpretive'') and that this effect is due to the patients' disrupted ability to perform tasks that require linking that meaning to real-world events such as matching a picture to a sentence (Waters et al, 1995). Grossman et al (1998), however, note that there were exceptions to the effect of number of propositions reported by Waters et al Some sentence types with the same number of propositions differed in accuracy (e.g., Rochon et al, 1994;Waters et al, 1998: subjectobject vs object-subject relatives, though not in the expected direction; Waters et al, 1995: cleft object vs active, dative vs passive), whereas others with different numbers of propositions did not differ in accuracy (e.g., Rochon et al, 1994: cleft object and passive vs subject-object relative; Waters et al 1995: dative vs conjoined, subject-object, and object-subject; conjoined vs cleft object and active conjoined theme). These deviations suggest that the number of propositions in a sentence is only one of several factors affecting AD patients' sentence-processing performance (see Grossman et al, 1998 for further discussion).…”