Verb agreements during on-line sentence processing in Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia.
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.
Price
Catherine C
CC
Clinical and Health Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA. cprice@phhp.ufl.edu
Grossman
Murray
M
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000503:physiopathology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology; D003704:Dementia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics