Language deficits in polyglot PD patients

Syntactic impairments in bilingual patients with Parkinson's disease appear to be greater in the patients' first language than their second, a small report in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry shows. The findings offer insights into the neurological involvement in acquisition of language, the study's authors report.To investigate the presence of language impairments in Parkinson's disease, Dr S Zanini and colleagues from research centres in Italy studied 24 bilingual patients, who had Friulian (a regional language spoken in North Eastern Italy) as their first language (L1) and Italian as their second (L2). Twelve patients with Parkinson's disease were compared with 12 normal controls who were matched for age, sex, and years of schooling.The authors asked each participant to perform three syntactic tasks involving the comprehension, judgement and correction of sentences. The results were consistent with the idea that patients with Parkinson's disease showed a greater impairment of L1 than L2. Patients seemed to be more impaired in accessing procedural knowledge of L1, while access to the declarative knowledge of L1 grammar seemed more preserved, at least to a considerable extent."Besides the theoretical interest, these findings are also relevant for clinical practice," the authors conclude. "In fact, polyglot patients with Parkinson's disease should be assessed in all their languages, or at least in the languages that they use most often as their linguistic deficits might be language specific. This might have important consequences for speech therapy (that is, definition of the priorities and rehabilitation in each language)."Reference...