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Sentence production in Parkinson disease: Effects of conceptual and task complexity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2011

MICHELLE S. TROCHE*
Affiliation:
Malcom Randall Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Gainesville, and University of Florida
LORI J. P. ALTMANN
Affiliation:
University of Florida
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Michelle S. Troche, Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, University of Florida, P.O. Box 117420, Gainesville, FL 32611. E-mail: michi81@ufl.edu

Abstract

Experimental studies of sentence production in Parkinson disease (PD) are rare. This study examined the relationship between cognitive abilities and performance on two sentence production tasks, sentence repetition, and sentence generation, in which complexity was manipulated. Thirty-eight older adults aged 60 to 85, half with PD, completed the two language tasks plus a cognitive battery. Participants with PD performed more poorly in the repetition task overall, especially in fluency, but differences were no longer significant once cognitive ability was controlled. In contrast, on the sentence generation task the PD group was significantly impaired on all language dimensions and overall performance. Although cognitive ability accounted for significant variance in all measures of sentence generation, the PD group remained significantly impaired when these factors were controlled. These findings suggest that, although language production is influenced by cognitive abilities, it can be significantly impaired in PD over and above the effects of differences in cognitive abilities.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

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