Purpose: Early cognitive symptoms such as word-finding difficulty (WFD) in daily conversation are common in Parkinson's disease (PD), but studies have been limited by a lack of feasible, quantitative measures. Linguistic analysis, focused on pauses in speech, may yield markers of impairment of cognition and communication in PD. The objective of…

Knowledge utilization is politically "hot" because it informs decisions on improving the quality of care in nursing homes (NHs). The difficulties encountered in implementing evidence-based knowledge into practice may be explained by contextual factors. Contextual factors are crucial to understanding the process of knowledge utilization;…

Approximately 5% of older adults have a dementia diagnosis, and language deterioration is commonly associated with this disorder (Kempler, 2005). Several instruments have been developed to diagnose dementia and assess language capabilities of elderly adults. However, none of these instruments take a functional approach to language assessment as…

Patients with semantic dementia (SD) show deficits in phoneme binding in immediate serial recall: when attempting to reproduce a sequence of words that they no longer fully understand, they show frequent migrations of phonemes between items (e.g., cap, frog recalled as "frap, cog"). This suggests that verbal short-term memory emerges directly from…

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) often overlaps clinically with corticobasal syndrome (CBS) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), both of which have prominent eye movement abnormalities. To investigate the ability of oculomotor performance to differentiate between FTLD, Alzheimer's disease, CBS and PSP, saccades and smooth pursuit were…