title: Information processing speed and sentence comprehension in Parkinson's disease.
abstract: This study tests the hypothesis that sentence comprehension difficulty in Parkinson's disease (PD) is related in part to altered information processing speed that plays a crucial role in grammatical processing. The authors measured information processing speed in 32 PD patients without dementia using a lexical list-priming paradigm in which the interstimulus interval (ISI) between the prime and the target varied. Sentence comprehension accuracy was also assessed in 22 of these patients. Sentence comprehension accuracy for object-relative center-embedded sentences was impaired in a subgroup of PD patients. This subgroup of PD patients primed at an abnormally long ISI. Similarly, only PD patients who primed at a long ISI had greater difficulty understanding sentences with an object-relative clause than a subject-relative clause. Findings suggest that slowed information processing speed contributes to sentence comprehension difficulty in PD.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia 19104-4283, USA. mgrossma@mail.med.upenn.edu
authors.forename: Murray
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Grossman
authors.forename: Edgar
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Zurif
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Penny
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Prather
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kalmanson
authors.forename: Matthew B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Stern
authors.forename: Howard I
authors.initials: HI
authors.lastname: Hurtig
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000978:Antiparkinson Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000523:psychology*; D011932:Reading; D013997:Time Factors
chemical_list: D000978:Antiparkinson Agents