Sentence comprehensionin Parkinson's disease.

Fernanda Prieto,Letícia Lessa Mansur,Márcia Radanovic,Egberto Reis Barbosa,Cristina Schmitt

doi:10.1590/s1980-57642008dn10400010

Fernanda Prieto, Letícia Lessa Mansur + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1590/s1980-57642008dn10400010

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Abstract

Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with dementia have impairment of syntactic comprehension. Non-demented PD patients also experience difficulties in sentence comprehension and can be particularly impaired in the processing of grammatical characteristics of syntactically complex sentences.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to verify the performance of PD patients without dementia in a syntactic comprehension task compared with normal elderly.MethodsWe studied oral sentence comprehension in fourteen patients with idiopathic PD together with fourteen controls matched for age and education, using the Token Test and Schmitt’s Syntactic Comprehension Test (developed in Brazilian Portuguese).ResultsFor the Token Test, there was no statistically significant difference between the PD group and the control group, whereas on the Syntactic Comprehension Test there was a slight statistically significant difference between the groups only for relatives in subject clauses (p=0.0407).ConclusionsPD patients differed from controls in the oral comprehension for relatives subject sentences alone. These results did not strictly reproduce those previously reported in the literature, and therefore point to the need for creating tests with diverse syntactic constructions in Portuguese able to produce consistent data regarding language behavior of Brazilian subjects with PD in comprehension tasks.

Highlights

Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with dementia have impairment of syntactic comprehension
The first studies reporting deficits of sentence comprehension in PD patients without dementia were conducted by Lieberman et al.,[3,5] showing that approximately half of the patients presented poor comprehension of complex syntactic constructions
Numerous studies have demonstrated that non-demented PD patients have difficulties in sentence comprehension and can be impaired in the processing of grammatical characteristics of syntactically complex sentences.[6,7,8,9,10,11]

Summary

Introduction

Abstract – Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients with dementia have impairment of syntactic comprehension. Numerous studies have demonstrated that non-demented PD patients have difficulties in sentence comprehension and can be impaired in the processing of grammatical characteristics of syntactically complex sentences.[6,7,8,9,10,11]

Results

Conclusion