Methodologies for assessing morphosyntactic ability in people with Alzheimer's disease

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Neurodegenerative Diseases
• Clinical Linguistics

Background:

• Assessing morphosyntactic abilities in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is crucial for research, diagnosis, and intervention.
• Existing studies use diverse methods for production and comprehension, but few compare protocols, leaving advantages/disadvantages unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare behavioral methodologies for assessing morphosyntactic production and comprehension in individuals with AD.
• Focuses on word and sentence levels in psycholinguistic research.

Main Methods:

• A narrative review of studies in English from major scientific databases.
• Included studies reported quantitative data, were peer-reviewed, and involved a healthy control group.
• Excluded studies using standardized assessment tools.

Main Results:

• Production tasks include narrative elicitation (interviews, picture description) and structured tasks (sentence completion, repetition).
• Comprehension tasks are offline (picture matching, grammaticality judgment) and online (cross-modal naming, acceptability judgment).
• Tasks have been applied across languages, revealing preserved abilities and deficits in AD.

Conclusions:

• The review identifies strengths and weaknesses of different methodologies for studying morphosyntax in AD.
• Highlights the need for combined approaches and research in diverse languages.
• Provides a methodological guide for researchers and clinicians studying language in AD.