Abstract Details

Title Impairment Sentence Comprehension and Semantic Comprehension in Patients wth Semantic Dementia (SD)

Topic Aging and Dementia

Presentation(s) P03 - (-)

Poster/Presentation
Number 090

Objective

Background BACKGROUND: Patients with SD have a form of primary progressive aphasia that interferes with word-finding and comprehension of single word meaning. Comprehension of sentences appears to be impaired, but the basis for this deficit is unclear. In this study, we assessed grammatical and working memory components of sentence comprehension.

Design/Methods DESIGN/METHODS: Patients with SD (n=15) and aMCI (n=16) were evaluated with a two-alternative forced-choice sentence-picture matching task that manipulated grammatical complexity by presenting cleft and center-embedded sentences. Half of each type of sentence was lengthened by a prepositional phrase strategically placed to increase working memory demands related to long-distance syntactic relations. We also assessed Mini Mental State Exam (MMSE), Pyramids and Palm Trees (PPT), and Boston Naming Test (BNT).

Results RESULTS: SD patients were significantly impaired in sentence comprehension compared to aMCI and controls (p<0.002). This deficit was equally evident for all grammatical forms and regardless of working memory demands. SD also were significantly worse than aMCI on MMSE (p< .002), BNT (p< .001), and PPT (p< .001). SD patients' sentence comprehension performance correlated with MMSE (r=0.68, p <.005) but not with other measures.

Conclusions CONCLUSIONS: SD patients are significantly impaired in sentence comprehension, but this cannot be easily explained by their known language deficits. Additional work is needed to explain the sentence comprehension deficit of SD patients.

Authors/Disclosures
Rebecca B. Williams (Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania) PRESENTER	No disclosure on file
Murray Grossman, MD, FAAN (University of Pennsylvania)	Dr. Grossman has received personal compensation in the range of $5,000-$9,999 for serving as an Editor, Associate Editor, or Editorial Advisory Board Member for Neurology. The institution of Dr. Grossman has received research support from NIH.
Teesta B. Soman, MD, MBBS (The Hospital for Sick Children)	No disclosure on file
Katya Rascovsky (University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine)	No disclosure on file

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