title: Propositional Density in Spoken and Written Language of Czech-Speaking Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment.
abstract: Propositional density (PD) is a measure of content richness in language production that declines in normal aging and more profoundly in dementia. The present study aimed to develop a PD scoring system for Czech and use it to compare PD in language productions of older people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and control participants matched on age, gender, and education.
  
  
  
  Groups of patients with aMCI and cognitively healthy control participants (N = 20 each) provided short spoken and written language samples. Two samples were elicited for each modality, 1 describing recent events and 1 describing childhood memories. Series of neuropsychological tests were administered. The groups were compared using t-tests and the relations between measures using correlation coefficients.
  
  
  
  PD was lower in spoken productions of patients with aMCI, compared with control participants, but only in language samples using remote memories. PD in these samples was related to verbal fluency and education but not to working memory. PD in written samples did not differ between participants with aMCI and control participants.
  
  
  
  PD in spoken language reflects the cognitive decline in people with aMCI, but the effect is relatively mild. The results support the existing findings that PD is related to verbal fluency.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic, Prague.
authors.forename: Filip
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Smolík
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Mental Health, Klecany, Czech RepublicFaculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Hana
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Stepankova
authors.affiliation: Memory Clinic, Department of Neurology, Charles University, Prague, Czech RepublicInternational Clinical Research Center, St. Anne's University Hospital Brno, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vyhnálek
authors.affiliation: Memory Clinic, Department of Neurology, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Tomáš
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nikolai
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Mental Health, Klecany, Czech RepublicFaculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Karolína
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Horáková
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Štepán
authors.initials: Š
authors.lastname: Matejka
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D060825:Cognitive Dysfunction / Q000523:psychology*; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012737:Sex Factors; D013060:Speech; D014956:Writing