Researchers identified a specific language deficit in individuals with aMCI, highlighting difficulties with complex sentence interpretation. This discovery adds a new dimension to understanding and detecting dementia risk beyond traditional memory assessments.
This deficit is independent of the memory deficit that characterizes this group and may provide an additional “cognitive biomarker” to aid in early detection — the time when treatments, as they continue to be developed, are likely to be most effective.
“Previous research has looked most often at single words and vocabulary,” says co-author Barbara Lust, a professor emerita at Cornell University. “We looked at a more complex level of language knowledge. When we process a sentence, we have to both grasp its syntax and construct a meaning. We found a breakdown at that higher level where you’re integrating form and meaning.”
The study pinpointed how well people process and reproduce sentences involving “anaphora.” In linguistics terms, this generally refers to the relation between a word and another form in the sentence, such the use of “his” in the sentence, “The electrician repaired his equipment.” Ultimately, aMCI patients performed significantly worse than the control groups when producing sentences with “anaphoric coreference,” the ones with ambiguity about the identity of the person referred to via a pronoun.
Looking ahead, the scholars say they would like to increase the size of the studies as part of an effort to continue to define how it is that diseases progress and how language may be a predictor of that.
Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)
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