Language Deterioration in Prodromal Alzheimer’s Disease Reveals a Breakdown in Language-Thought Relations: New Study of Null Anaphora in Adjunct Clauses

Authors

  • Barbara Lust
    Cognitive Science, Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA; Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
  • Suzanne Flynn
    Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
  • Charles Henderson
    In Memoriam, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
  • James Gair
    In Memoriam, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
  • Janet Cohen Sherman
    Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

Abstract

In this paper, we extend an interdisciplinary experimental program in which we study language deterioration in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI), a period of prodromal Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). We report new results which reveal a language deficit in sentences with null arguments in temporal adjuncts, Control structures, replicating previous research with lexical pronouns. The fact that language deterioration in sentences with null pronominals replicates that with lexical pronouns provides evidence that aMCI language deterioration is localized in the anaphoric construal types they share, generalizing over the phonetic variation of their pro form. We argue that the aMCI deficit reflects the architecture of the Language Faculty (LF) as it constrains the creation of language meaning through dual anaphoric construal types. We suggest that our new results are consistent with linguistic analyses of Control structures and motivate integration of Control theory and Binding Theory in a Minimalist approach to the LF. They inform more focused interdisciplinary investigations of the neuroscientific foundations of the Language Faculty and of language impairment such as aMCI (cf. Moro et al., 2001). We sketch possible directions for future research, both theoretical and empirical.