Constrained Emotional Sentence Production in Parkinson's Disease

Abstract

Purpose: Deficits in the processing and production of emotional cues are well documented in the Parkinson's disease (PD) literature; however, few have ventured to explore how impairments may impact emotional language use in this population, particularly beyond the word level. Emotional language is an important multidimensional manner of communicating one's wants and needs; thus, the current study sought to explore how various aspects of language production may be impacted by the emotionality of a stimulus.

Method: Eighteen persons with PD and 22 healthy adults completed a constrained emotional sentence production task in which the affective target word was either a noun or a verb. Output was analyzed for fluency, grammaticality, completeness, and response initiation times. Cognitive (i.e., working memory [WM], inhibition, and switching) and mood (i.e., depression and apathy) measures were examined as factors influencing performance.

Results: Individuals with PD produced fewer fluent responses than healthy controls. Furthermore, they had fewer grammatical responses in their production of negative sentences and exhibited reduced information completeness when producing sentences containing positive stimuli. Group differences could not be wholly attributed to individual differences in WM or apathy.

Conclusions: Our results support those of others that document language production deficits in individuals with PD above and beyond those impairments that can be explained by the select cognitive abilities explored here. Moreover, the emotionality of the topic may impact various aspects of communicative competence in persons with PD. For instance, disease processes associated with degeneration of neural substrates important for processing negative stimuli may also impact the grammaticality of productions containing negatively valenced content. Thus, it is important to consider how individuals in this population communicate during emotional circumstances.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27289413.