Neurolinguistic characteristics of language production in Huntington's disease: a preliminary report.

Samples of spontaneous and descriptive speech were obtained from 12 patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and 24 at risk (AR) controls. The data were assessed according to a neurolinguistic protocol. HD was identified with a significant reduction in number of words produced, a diminished level of syntactic complexity, reductions of melodic line, phrase length, articulatory agility, and grammatical form, and increases in paraphasic errors and word-finding difficulty. The data were interpreted in support of the hypothesis that neostriatal pathology affects linguistic processing.