We tested the role of teh output lexicon in AD patients' verb naming in this study by assessing their recognition naming for verbs. Dual task studies also show a deficit in the central executive component of working memory. Explanations forwarded to account for the sentence comprehension deficit in PD have included a compromised grammatical parser which has interfered with the on-line processing of syntactically complex sentences or a limitation in the central executive that has constrained the processing resources that can be devoted to sentence comprehension. This paper investigates more directly the role of working memory in the syntactic processing of PD patients. We administered a dual task procedure to PD patients, in which the primary task monitored the comprehension of sentences with various syntactic structures and the secondary task manipulated concurrent processing demands.
Language deficits are ubiquitous amoung patients with dementia.
Considerable debate has surrounded the issue of whether these deficits are due to a language processing deficit per se or to some other cognitive impairment that is associated with the dementia. We reason that different performance profiles in groups of demented patients would not be consistent with the claim that the comprehension deficits of demented patients are due simply to the dementia. We also sought to characterize relative impairments in comprehension across patient groups that have been directly compared in their comprehension only rarely.