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Cognitive resources during sentence processing in Alzheimer's disease
1Department of Neurology - 3 Gates, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-4283, USA. mgrossma@mail.med.upenn.edu
Neuropsychologia
|October 5, 2001
Summary
Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients struggle with sentence comprehension, showing delayed responses to grammatical errors. This difficulty is linked to slower processing and impaired inhibition, affecting their ability to understand complex sentences.
Area of Science:
- Neurology
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Sentence comprehension in Alzheimer's disease (AD) is often impaired.
- Executive functions, such as inhibitory control, may play a crucial role in language processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess sentence comprehension in AD patients by minimizing executive resource demands.
- To investigate the time course of agreement processing in AD.
Main Methods:
- 17 AD patients and 17 healthy elderly controls participated.
- Participants detected a target word in sentences with grammatical or semantic agreement violations.
- Response times were measured to assess sensitivity to agreement violations.
Main Results:
- Healthy controls showed immediate sensitivity to agreement violations.
- AD patients exhibited delayed sensitivity to agreement violations, particularly grammatical ones.
- Delayed sensitivity correlated with impaired inhibitory control, planning, and short-term memory.
Conclusions:
- AD patients experience difficulties in processing sentence structure due to slowed information processing speed.
- Impaired inhibition may contribute to the challenges AD patients face in understanding complex grammatical structures.