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Sentence production in Parkinson's disease
Jessica Dick1, Jennifer Fredrick1, Grace Man1
1a Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences , Purdue University , West Lafayette , IN , USA.
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
|March 2, 2018
Summary
Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) do not exhibit syntactic production deficits, differentiating their language changes from those seen in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. This suggests syntactic impairment is not a core issue in PD language changes.
Area of Science:
- Neurolinguistics
- Clinical Linguistics
- Neurodegenerative Diseases
Background:
- Evidence suggests language changes in non-demented Parkinson's disease (PD) individuals, but deficits are unclear.
- The role of fronto-basal ganglia dysfunction in PD language impairments is debated, with some predicting similarities to Broca's aphasia.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate sentence production and syntactic processing in individuals with PD.
- To compare syntactic abilities in PD with healthy adults and individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Assessed grammatical sentences, embedded clauses, and verb argument production using a story-telling task.
- Experiment 2: Employed a structured sentence elicitation task manipulating syntactic complexity (canonical vs. non-canonical word order).
Main Results:
- Only individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia showed significantly impaired syntactic production.
- Participants with PD did not exhibit syntactic production deficits in either experiment.
- PD participants did show impairments in lexical retrieval, word/sentence repetition, and speech production.
Conclusions:
- Impaired syntactic processing is not a core deficit in non-demented individuals with PD.
- Language changes in PD are qualitatively distinct from the language deficits observed in aphasia.