Session Information
Date: Thursday, June 8, 2017
Session Title: Parkinson’s Disease: Clinical Trials, Pharmacology And Treatment
Session Time: 1:15pm-2:45pm
Location: Exhibit Hall C
Objective: The aim of our research was to analyze comprehension of various syntactic constructions in Slovak-speaking PD-ND patients . We were particularly interested in exploring the influence of length, order of thematic roles, and presence of a morphological cue placed on the first noun.
Background: According to some studies sentence comprehension in patients with different neurodegenerative disorders is preserved, at least in the early stages of the disease. By contrast, other researchers suggest that this level of language information processing is already compromised in non-demented patients with Parkinson´s disease (PD-ND) .
Methods: We used our Slovak battery of sentence comprehension that required matching pictures to spoken sentences. The test consists of 48 semantically reversible sentences. These sentences contain transitive verbs and two nouns (person/animal), one functioning as a subject and the other as an object, that can both perform the action expressed by the verb. We evaluated 20 Slovak speaking PD-ND participants.
Results: We descriptively assessed 20 PD-ND patients (11 men and 9 women) with the duration of disease 8,58 (±4,92) years. The mean age of patients was 61,65 (±9,69). UPDRS III score of clinician-assessed motor function was 33,85 (±8,99) and the average of H&Y stage was 2,45(±0,46). Statistical analyses indicated mild impairments affecting the comprehension of some complex sentences in PD-ND patients (i.e. embedded object clause). There was no significant correlation between results in the sentence comprehension test and UPDRS III score (-0,397) or Hoehn & Yahr stage (-0,176).
Conclusions: Comprehensive assessment of language comprehension in patient with neurodegenerative disorders can reveal impairments at the sentence level even in the early stages of the disease. These results have implications not only for early diagnosis but also for communication with patients with PD.
This research was supported APVV (15-0155) grant.
To cite this abstract in AMA style:
A. Kušnírová, J. Marková, Z. Košutzká, M. Egryová, M. Pápayová, P. Valkovič, Z. Cséfalvay. Sentence comprehension in Slovak speaking patients with Parkinson´s disease – preliminary results [abstract]. Mov Disord. 2017; 32 (suppl 2). https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/sentence-comprehension-in-slovak-speaking-patients-with-parkinsons-disease-preliminary-results/. Accessed June 15, 2025.« Back to 2017 International Congress
MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/sentence-comprehension-in-slovak-speaking-patients-with-parkinsons-disease-preliminary-results/