Verb agreements during on-line sentence processing in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia

Abstract

An on-line “word detection” paradigm was used to assess the comprehension of thematic and transitive verb agreements during sentence processing in individuals diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s Disease (AD, n = 15) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD, n = 14). AD, FTD, and control participants ( n = 17) were asked to listen for a word in a sentence. Unbeknownst to the participants, the target word followed an agreement involving a verb’s transitivity or thematic role component. Control participants took significantly longer to respond to a target word only when it immediately followed a violation of a thematic role agreement or a transitivity agreement, relative to target word detection immediately following the corresponding correct agreement. AD patients were selectively insensitive to thematic role agreement violations, although they demonstrated a normal processing pattern for transitivity agreements. This is consistent with previous observations showing selective difficulty with the thematic role component of a verb in AD. FTD patients were insensitive to violations of thematic role and transitivity agreements. FTD patients’ impairment for both transitivity and thematic role agreements may reflect a broader degradation of verb knowledge that involves both grammatical and semantic representations, or difficulty processing sentence structure that also causes a thematic role deficit.