Journal
CORTEX
Volume 45, Issue 8, Pages 972-981Publisher
ELSEVIER MASSON
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2009.02.021
Keywords
Fronto-striatal mechanisms; Nonliteral language; Neurogenic language impairment; Parkinson's disease; Pragmatics; Theory of mind
Funding
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- CIHR Institute of Aging
- Fonds de la recherche en sante du Quebec
- McGill University
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Many individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) are known to have difficulties in understanding pragmatic aspects of language. In the present study, a group of eleven non-demented PD patients and eleven healthy control (HC) participants were tested on their ability to interpret communicative intentions underlying verbal irony and lies, as well as on their ability to infer first- and second-order mental states (i.e., theory of mind). Following Winner et al. (1998), participants answered different types of questions about the events which unfolded in stories which ended in either an ironic statement or a lie. Results showed that PD patients were significantly less accurate than HC participants in assigning second-order beliefs during the story comprehension task, suggesting that the ability to make a second-order mental state attribution declines in PD. The PD patients were also less able to distinguish whether the final statement of a story should be interpreted as a joke or a lie, suggesting a failure in pragmatic interpretation abilities. The implications of frontal lobe dysfunction in PD as a source of difficulties with working memory, mental state attributions, and pragmatic language deficits are discussed in the context of these findings. (C) 2009 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available