This thesis investigated sentence comprehension impairments in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's-type (DAT). The first three experiments investigated the nature of the impairments using different tasks. Across tasks, patients' performance by syntactic complexity, but was poorer for sentences that had more propositions. Results are discussed in terms of a post-interpretive processing impairment in these patients. Two additional experiments investigated possible determinants of sentence comprehension impairments in DAT. One employed a dual-task paradigm to examine the effect of increasing the processing load associated with sentence comprehension. The other examined processing resource limitations in the patients tested in the first and second experiments by employing a battery of tasks designed to measure all aspects of working memory. In both experiments, evidence for processing resource limitations was seen in impaired performance on a concurrent task in dual-task conditions. Results of the fifth experiment also provided evidence that DAT patients' sentence comprehension impairments are correlated with processing resource limitations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.39439 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Rochon, Elizabeth |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (School of Human Communication Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001305125, proquestno: NN80408, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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