sentence comprehension and its association with executive functions in patients with parkinsons disease句子理解及其与帕金森氏症患者的执行功能.pdfVIP

SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research Parkinson’s Disease Volume 2011, Article ID 213983, 15 pages doi:10.4061/2011/213983 Research Article Sentence Comprehension and Its Association with Executive Functions in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease Katrien S. F. Colman,1 Janneke Koerts,2 Laurie A. Stowe,1 Klaus L. Leenders,3 and Roelien Bastiaanse1 1 Department of Neurolinguistics, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands 2 Department of Clinical and Developmental Neuropsychology, University of Groningen, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS Groningen, The Netherlands 3 Department of Neurology, University Medical Center Groningen, Hanzeplein 1, P.O. Box 30.001, 9700 RB Groningen, The Netherlands Correspondence should be addressed to Katrien S.F. Colman, k.s.f.colman@rug.nl Received 14 March 2011; Revised 16 June 2011; Accepted 18 July 2011 Academic Editor: Harrison N. Jones Copyright © 2011 Katrien S.F. Colman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Coexistent impairments in executive functions and language comprehension in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have been repeatedly observed. In this study, the aim was to provide insights into the interaction between linguistic representation and processing and executive functioning. Therefore, sentence comprehension and executive functions were assessed in 28 Dutch- speaking PD patients and 28 healthy control subjects. Three aspects of the sentence materials were varied: (1) phrase structure complexity, (2) sentence length, and (3) picture congruence. PD patients with mild-to-moderate disease severity showed d