Gs. Waters et D. Caplan, WORKING-MEMORY AND ONLINE SENTENCE COMPREHENSION IN PATIENTS WITH ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE, Journal of psycholinguistic research, 26(4), 1997, pp. 377-400
We examined the ability of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's t
ype (DAT) and normal controls to perform a sentence acceptability judg
ment task that required determining the I referent for a reflexive pro
noun. Performance on three different sentence types that differed in t
erms of syntactic complexity was assessed. Subjects performed the task
alone and under two different dual-task conditions which required con
tinuous, externally paced responses. DAT patients were move affected t
han controls by the dual-task conditions, but were not disproportionat
ely impaired on the more complex sentence types. The failure of DAT pa
tients to be disproportionately affected on the most complex sentence
types in the dual-task conditions provides evidence for the separation
of the processing resources that are used in sentence comprehension f
rom those involved in other tasks.