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Evidence for Impaired sentence comprehension in early Alzheimer's disease.
Authors:
Croot, K., Hodges, J.R. & Patterson, K.
Reference:
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 1999, 5, 393-404.
Year of publication:
1999
CBU number:
3803
Abstract:
The authors investigate sentence comprehension in 46 patients with probable Minimal (very mild), Mild and Moderate Dementia of the Alzheimer Type (DAT), comparing their performance on the Test for the Reception of Grammar (TROG), with that oaf 20 age- and education-matched controls. Performance on the TROG was generally related to dementia severity, independent of lexico-semantic and working memory (digit span) impairments, but related to at least one measure of attention. Some patients in the Minimal group showed sentence comprehension deficits while others in the Moderate group did not, indicating that DAT may impair sentence comprehension at the very earliest stages of disease, but that its effects are heterogeneous. Patients were most impaired on sentences with two propositions and non-canonical word order, suggesting difficulties with both interpretative and post-interpretative stages of sentence processing. Further investigation is needed into the relationship between attentional processes, interpretative and post-interpretative stages of syntactic processing in DAT.
