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KMID : 0921420120170020338
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Korean Journal of Communication Disorders
2012 Volume.17 No. 2 p.338 ~ p.355
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Effects of Syntactic Complexity on Sentence Comprehension in Persons with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Dementia of Alzheimer’s Type
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Kim Jin-Kyung
Sung Jee-Eun
Jeong Jee-Hyang
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Abstract
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Background & Objectives : Several studies have investigated sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with dementia of Alzheimer’s type (DAT) and individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), who have mostly converted to DAT. However, the effects of syntactic complexity on sentence comprehension have not been thoroughly studied in Korean-speaking individuals with MCI and DAT. The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether there were significant differences in a sentence-picture matching (SPM) task as a function of syntactic complexity among three groups: normal elderly adults (NEA), MCI, and DAT.
Methods: Twenty individuals with MCI, 14 with DAT, and 20 age-matched NEA participated in the study. Performance on the SPM task was analyzed using a two-way mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA). The SPM task consisted of five different syntactic structures: 1) coordinate conjunction, 2) subject-subject relative clause, 3) subject-object relative clause, 4) object-subject relative clause, and 5) object-object relative clause.
Results: The results can be summarized as follows. First, there were significant differences among the three groups and the results indicated that the NEA group presented higher accuracy than the MCI and DAT groups, but the MCI group did not differ from the DAT group. Second, sentences with higher syntactic complexity components yielded lower accuracy than those with simpler syntactic structures. Third, the NEA group showed significantly higher accuracy than the MCI and DAT groups, who did not differ from each other, in simple sentences with parallel function and subject related sentences than in complex sentences with non-parallel function and object related sentences.
Discussion & Conclusions: The results of this study indicate that Korean-speaking individuals with MCI and DAT are less accurate in overall sentence comprehension than the NEA group. In addition, all of the groups showed lower accuracy in comprehension of complex sentences than simple sentences. The current results suggest that the syntactic-complexity based on the SPM task could be a sensitive tool for use in differentiating the MCI and DAT groups from the normal aging population.
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KEYWORD
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syntactic complexity, sentence comprehension, mild cognitive impairment, dementia of Alzheimer’s Type
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