Syntactic comprehension abilities of Slovenian-speaking individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease

EasyChair Preprint 6475

Abstract

Introduction:The present study aims to assess syntactic abilities of Slovenian-speaking individuals in comprehending centre-embedded relative clauses (CE-RC), wh-questions and non-canonical sentences (OVS). Slovenian is a highly inflected, morphologically rich language where grammatical morphemes clearly code the function of each word in the sentence. Methods:4 participants with mild-to-moderate pAD (MMSE score: 16-25; age: 70-84) and 10 healthy controls participated in a sentence-picture matching task. They had to match a total of 60 sentences with pictures depicting the corresponding action. Each action belonged to one of the following types of sentences: CE-RC (n=20), wh-questions (n=20) and OVS sentences (n=20). For each trial, they were presented with 3 pictures (2 in the case of wh-questions) and were instructed to choose the one which best describes the sentence given to them. Results: Percentages of correct responses are shown in Figure 1. A general observation is that participants do manifest a syntactic deficit, as they perform either at chance or below chance at the comprehension of structures under investigation. Specifically, all four individuals performed below chance when it comes to CE-RC, while they were at chance when it comes to wh-questions and OVS-sentences for which individual variability is also observed. Conclusions: Results indicate a syntactic impairment in Slovenian-speaking individuals with pAD when it comes to the comprehension of complex structures. The dichotomy between CE-RC on the one hand, and wh-questions & OVS sentences on the other, could be attributed to the different demands CE-RC pose on the memory mechanism supporting syntactic comprehension. Comprehension of CE-RC appears to be more difficult compared to the comprehension of referential (wh-questions) and non-canonical structures in terms of argument realization (OVS).

Keyphrases: Alzheimer's disease, OVS structures, comprehension, relative clauses, syntax, wh-questions

@booklet{EasyChair:6475,
  author    = {Christina Manouilidou and Katarina Marjanovič and Zvezdan Pirtošek},
  title     = {Syntactic comprehension abilities of Slovenian-speaking individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6475},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}