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Constrained sentence production in probable Alzheimer disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2004

LORI J. P. ALTMANN
LORI J. P. ALTMANN
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Abstract

This study examines the speech of older adults with and without probable Alzheimer disease (PAD) when they produce sentences that include a verb and two nouns provided by the experimenter. Compared to healthy controls, individuals with mild PAD produced fewer correct responses as well as anomalous proportions of active and passive sentences. Responses were particularly impaired when canonical sentence structures had to be suppressed and unusual sentence structures generated. The sentence production accuracy of individuals with PAD correlated strongly with performance on a picture-naming task. The findings support a theory in which the ability to fully activate semantic representations is impaired in PAD, resulting in proportional impairments on single-word and sentence production tasks.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 145 - 173
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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