GRAMMATICAL ABILITIES IN PARKINSONS-DISEASE - EVIDENCE FROM WRITTEN SENTENCES

This study examined the grammatical content of written sentences elici ted from 96 Parkinson's patients, 30 Parkinson's with dementia patient s and 167 control subjects. Parkinson's patients without dementia or w ith mild dementia presented no impairments in sentence length, syntact ic complexity or amount of information content. Moderately demented Pa rkinson's patients showed reduced sentence length and information cont ent but normal syntactic complexity. This pattern of results provides evidence that lexical-semantic content is more susceptible to decline than syntactic structure with the progression of dementia in Parkinson 's disease. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.