Language Deficits in Depression: Comparisons with SDAT and Normal Aging

Abstract

In order to contribute to the definition of the structure of cognitive deficits in major depression/unipolar, language processing was studied in 20 elderly persons with major depression/unipolar, 23 elderly with SDAT, and 20 normal elderly. Measures administered included the Western Aphasia Battery, Test for Syntactic Complexity, and Chomsky Test of Syntax. Results indicate that depressed elderly performance on structural language variables of repetition, naming, auditory verbal comprehension, syntax, and reading is significantly better than performance of the SDAT sample. In contrast, results suggest that in comparing normal and depressed elderly, the normal elderly have the edge. On three measures of eleven, there are significant differences between depressed and normal elderly language processing. In analyzing the measures of significant difference, it is determined that complexity is an intervening variable. It is concluded that although the reason for language deficits in major depression/unipolar is as yet unknown, it is not justifiable at present to rule out an organic hypothesis.

Negligible Effects of Depression on Verbal and Spatial Performance in Alzheimer’s Disease

“…The results demonstrate that it did not: no differences between the AD and AD/D groups were observed in letter fluency, category fluency, block design or clock drawing. The lack of additional effect of depression on verbal and visuospatial performance in AD should be viewed in light of the fact that depression-related deficits have been observed in these cognitive domains among nondemented individuals [17 [20][21][22]32]. Moreover, the nonexistent effects of depression in this study may not be attributable to measurement artifacts; no floor or ceiling effects were apparent in the data.…”

“…Relatedly, clinical depression is known to influence multiple cognitive abilities including memory [18,19], verbal ability [17,20,21] and visuospatial skill [21,22], although the size of depression-related cognitive impairments is considerably smaller than what is true in dementia.…”

“…There is some evidence to suggest that verbal skill is more compromised in depression than is episodic memory [20,32]. Thus, it is possible that effects of depression on cognitive performance in AD may be more easily detected for language-oriented tasks than for memory tasks.…”

Verb acquisition and representation in Alzheimer's disease

“…Studies of grammatical processing in AD have been controversial. Some work shows successful processing of syntax and grammar in these patients (Blanken, Dittman, Haas, & Wallesch, 1987;Illes, 1990;Irigaray, 1973;Kemper, LaBarge, Ferraro, Cheung, & Storandt, 1993;Kempler, Curtiss, & Jackson, 1987), while other reports describe grammatical impairments (Croot, Hodges, & Patterson, 1999;Emery & Breslau, 1989;Kempler, Almor, Tyler, Andersen, & MacDonald, 1998;Rochon, Waters, & Caplan, 1994). We and others find that AD patients have difficulty with grammatical processing, but experimental evidence attributes this to a limitation of the executive resources needed to process long-distance grammatical dependencies in a sentence.…”

Characteristics of Language Performance in Four Groups of Patients Attending a Memory Clinic

“…Published work reports comparisons of various combinations of these clinical groups, AD, VaD, depressed and normal elderly (Bayles and Boone, 1982;Hier et al, 1985;Emery and Breslau, 1989) Both dementia groups in this study have mean scores on the MMSE and CAMCOG indicating mild impairment. All dementia patients had NART scores of above average, indicating a high degree of intellectual ability.…”