An aspect of auditory word and sentence comprehension in Alzheimer's disease

Although Alzheimer's disease (AD) is marked by a progressive decline in verbal communication, only a few studies have evaluated sentence comprehension in AD. Theoretically, an impairment of sentence comprehension can be caused by inability to comprehend the information content of different types of words, by inability to decode syntactic relationships within the sentence, or by nonlinguistic deficits, such as impairment in the comprehension of pragmatics or deterioration in working memory. In the present study we evaluated aspects of word and sentence comprehension in 33 Hebrew-speaking AD patients and 16 controls. AD patients were severely impaired on sentence comprehension. Single word comprehension, however, remained preserved. We conclude that the ability to grasp grammatical meaning appears to be predominantly affected in AD.