PILOT--LANGUAGE PROCESSING IN BILINGUAL ALZHEIMER'S PATIENTS

神经功能障碍患者双语能力的研究 (主要是单侧局灶性病变)已经产生了一些混合的 调查结果。这些案例包括两种语言并行崩溃的情况， 只细分患者的一种语言(第一种或第二种) 另一种语言相对较少，最初两种语言都失去了 具有差异恢复的语言(即一种语言改进更多 而不是另一个)。双语广告的使用提供了一个更好的机会 确定在神经侮辱下语言障碍的性质 以下三个原因。首先，阿尔茨海默病患者患有 进行性双侧皮质变性。这提供了 与单侧糖尿病患者的研究相比，同质性更大 局灶性病变。第二，早期患者的识别 AD的各个阶段将允许我们识别语言优势的模式 在疾病走到尽头之前。最后，进步性 应有助于阐明维持的不同模式 在患者的两种语言中都可以观察到不同的丢失 时间点。将使用两个在线任务来测试双语 语言处理。在跨模式单词发音范例中， 受试者将被呈现给听觉文本，并在文本中进行探索 具有语义或语言上一致和不一致的单词。这个 第二个在线任务是句子翻译任务，这是一种被迫选择 要求受试者选择句子主题的任务 有两个名词和一个动词。这两个范例将在AD中使用 患者和老年对照。AD患者将只接受一次测试。 这一纵向设计应该为我们提供必要的信息 关于弥漫性神经侮辱对行为模式的影响 双语阿尔茨海默病患者的句法和语义保留或分解。 这些结果，当与正常的老年对照组和 大学老年对照，应该有助于揭示老龄化和 对双语语言处理的痴呆症。

The study of bilingualism in individuals with neurological dysfunction (primarily unilateral focal lesions) has yielded a number of mixed findings. These include cases of parallel breakdown in both languages, breakdown of only one of a patient's languages (either first or second) with a relative sparing of the other language, and initial loss of both languages with differential recovery (i.e. one language improves more than the other). The use of bilingual AD offers an opportunity to better identify the nature of language breakdown under neurological insult for the following three reasons. First of all, patients with AD suffer from progressive bilateral patterns of cortical degeneration. This provides a larger homogeneity than studies with patients suffering form unilateral focal lesions. Second, the identification of patients in the early stages of AD will permit us to identify patterns of language dominance before the disease has run its course. Finally, the progressive nature of AD should help to elucidate the differential patterns of maintenance and loss that are observed in both of a patient's languages at various points in time. Two on-line tasks will be used to test bilingual language processing. In the cross-modal word pronunciation paradigm, subjects will presented with auditory texts and probed during the text with semantically or linguistically congruent and incongruent words. The second on-line task, the sentence interpretation task, is a forced choice task in which subjects will be asked to pick the subject of sentences with two nouns and a verb. These two paradigms will be employed with AD patients and elderly controls. AD patients will be tested only once. This longitudinal design should provide us the essential information about the effect of diffuse neurological insult on the pattern of syntactic and semantic sparing or breakdown in bilingual AD patients. These results, when compared to those of normal elderly controls and college aged controls, should help to reveal the impact of aging and dementia on bilingual language processing.