Parkinson's Disease Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Parkinson's Disease, including details on symptoms, treatment, genetics, medication.

Past tense formation and comprehension of passive sentences in Parkinson's disease: evidence from Greek.

Terzi A, Papapetropoulos S, Kouvelas ED

Department of Speech and Language Therapy, Technological Educational Institute of Patras, Greece. aterzi@teipat.gr

The present study investigates the production of regular and irregular verbs in the past tense and the comprehension of passive sentences by Greek-speaking PD patients, and compares their behavior to that of normal speakers. Although the two groups manifest large scale differences at all the above constructions, the behavior of PDs is not different at regular vs. irregular past tense formation neither did we obtain strong evidence that they do not comprehend passives, most importantly, they certainly do not perform at chance. On the basis of the above, we conclude that there are no indications for a clearly linguistic deficit of the PD group, hence, their difference with the control group should be attributed to other factors, such as the computational demands of the tasks.

Published 15 August 2005 in Brain Lang, 94(3): 297-303.
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