Greater syntactic impairments in native language in bilingual Parkinsonian patients.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the presence of syntactic impairments in native language in Parkinson's disease. METHODS: Twelve bilingual patients, with Friulian as their first language (L1) and Italian as their second (L2), with Parkinson's disease and 12 normal controls matched for age, sex, and years of schooling, were studied on three syntactic tasks. RESULTS: Patients with Parkinson's disease showed a greater impairment of L1 than L2. CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide evidence of greater basal ganglia involvement in the acquisition and further processing of grammar in L1 v L2 possibly due to a major involvement of procedural memory in representing L1 grammar.

A form of ideational apraxia as a delective deficit of contention scheduling.

In this paper we studied three brain-damaged patients: the first two, DR and FG, had limb apraxia whilst the third was a control patient (WH2) with an executive function disorder but without limb apraxia. DR and FG were impaired in carrying out everyday actions, whilst they maintained the ability to sequence photographs representing those same activities. The failure in the action production task was not caused by visual agnosia for objects, as the patients could recognise them from sight. Nor was it produced by a loss of knowledge about their functions (De Renzi & Lucchelli, 1988), as DR and FG could identify objects from descriptions of their use. WH2's pattern of performance doubly dissociated from that of the apraxic patients, namely spared action production on the multiple object test, but faulty sequencing of photographs. WH2's difficulties in sequencing photographs were not due to a failure to understand the task, as she could sequence stimuli other than actions (e.g., shapes and numbers). Nor were the differences due to a loss of knowledge about the actions, since she could perform and identify them from photographs. These results show that the kind of apraxia observed in DR and FG is not produced by a degraded action sequence representation (Lehmkuhl & Poeck, 1981; Poeck & Lehmkuhl, 1980). We interpreted our results within a contention scheduling model (Cooper & Shallice, 2000; Norman & Shallice, 1986).

Pragmatic disorders of verbal communication.

CONCLUSION: Verbal communication impairments frequently follow damage to the right cerebral hemisphere. These deficits are usually underestimated because RHD patients are not routinely referred to speech therapists. The nature of pragmatic disorders in verbal communication in RHD patients still remains to be clarified. In particular, it is still unclear whether these impairments are language-specific or attention-specific (e.g. an attentional deficit with respect to verbal cues only, which hinders the ability to go beyond the literal meaning of sentences), or should to be interpreted as an expression of a wider impairment in processing complex materials. Further research is needed to properly quantify the incidence of verbal communication disorders in RHD patients and to understand how pragmatic competence is organized in the brain.