Sentence comprehension in Slovak-speaking patients with Parkinson disease

Abstract

Aim: To map the sentence comprehension in Slovak speaking patients with Parkinson´s disease (PD). Method: We assessed the comprehension of reversible sentences (sentences in which the participants of the action can change their roles) with the Test of sentence comprehension and cognitive functions with standard neuropsychological battery. Sample: 37 patients with idiopathic PD and 37 healthy controls participated in the research. Groups did not differ regarding the age, education and sex. The diagnosis in patients was established by a neurologist. Results: The statistical comparison of data by Mann-Whitney U test revealed, that patients reached significantly lower score only in one out of six sentence types (p=0,016), namely in comprehension of center-embedded object relative clauses (e.g. Mother, which the daughter kissed, has the light dress.). They were significantly worse also in decoding sentences with non-canonical order of thematic roles (first patient, then agent; p=0,013). Significant correlations of individual syntactic constructions appeared with three tests: Rey Complex Figure Test, Semantic fluency and Letter-Number sequencing. Conclusion : According to our results, there are sentence comprehension deficits in Slovak speaking patients with PD, while sentence comprehension ability is correlated with cognitive test performance.