Lee Christine, Grossman Murray, Morris Jennifer, Stern Matthew B, Hurtig Howard I
Department of Neurology, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 3 Gates Center, 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-4283, USA.
Brain Lang. 2003 Jun;85(3):347-56. doi: 10.1016/s0093-934x(03)00063-4.
Several studies have suggested that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have sentence comprehension difficulty in part because of their limited executive resources. However, these assessments confound the executive resources contributing to sentence comprehension with the resources needed for task performance. In the present study, we used a word detection technique that minimizes task demands in order to evaluate attentional and processing speed resources during the comprehension of simple sentences without subordinate clauses and sentences containing subject-relative and object-relative center-embedded subordinate clauses. We found that PD patients have poor sensitivity to phonetic errors embedded in unbound grammatical morphemes, regardless of the clausal structure of the sentence, suggesting difficulty attending to grammatical morphemes. We also found that PD patients are significantly slowed in their sensitivity to phonetic errors in content words embedded in object-relative center-embedded sentences. Slowed sensitivity to content words in object-relative sentences was correlated with timed executive measures of planning. On a traditional measure of comprehension, these PD patients were impaired for sentences containing object-relative center-embedded clauses compared to sentences with subject-relative center-embedded clauses, and comprehension of object-relative sentences was correlated with executive measures. Our findings are consistent with the claim that limited executive resources for strategic attention and processing speed contribute to the sentence comprehension difficulties of PD patients.
多项研究表明，帕金森病（PD）患者存在句子理解困难，部分原因是其执行资源有限。然而，这些评估将有助于句子理解的执行资源与任务执行所需的资源混为一谈。在本研究中，我们使用了一种将任务需求降至最低的单词检测技术，以评估在理解不含从句的简单句子以及包含主语关系和宾语关系中心嵌入从句的句子时的注意力和处理速度资源。我们发现，PD患者对未绑定语法语素中嵌入的语音错误敏感性较差，无论句子的从句结构如何，这表明他们在关注语法语素方面存在困难。我们还发现，PD患者对宾语关系中心嵌入句中实词的语音错误的敏感性显著减慢。对宾语关系句中实词的敏感性减慢与计划的定时执行测量相关。在传统的理解测量中，与包含主语关系中心嵌入从句的句子相比，这些PD患者对包含宾语关系中心嵌入从句的句子理解受损，并且宾语关系句的理解与执行测量相关。我们的研究结果与以下观点一致，即用于策略性注意力和处理速度的有限执行资源导致了PD患者的句子理解困难。
