Assessment and treatment of cognitive-linguistic disorder in Parkinson disease

[Extract] As outlined in Chapter 5, cognitive deficits associated with Parkinson Disease (PD) largely have been attributed to dysfunctional striatofrontal circuitry (Dubois & Pillon, 1991), and include impairments of visuospatial functioning; free recall memory; working memory; effort demanding tasks (e.g., rapid processing and complex problem solving); set formation and set shifting entailing the internal control of attention, sequencing, temporal order, and recency discrimination; as well as executive functioning (Saint-Cyr & Trepanier, 2000). The assessment and treatment of these cognitive sequelae are routinely undertaken by the neuropsychologist, with little attention being paid to the comprehensive investigation of potential language breakdown in PD. In general, confrontation naming and verbal fluency tasks represent the mainstay of neuropsychological tools dedicated to the assessment of language functioning in PD patients, with indexes of more complex comprehension and sentential level production skills infrequently applied. Nevertheless, current evidence suggests that language deficits in PD typically extend beyond the level of single word production.