Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Parkinson's disease (PD) is mostly known for its motor symptoms: tremor, rigidity, and slowness of movement. However, cognitive impairments such as memory, attention, and planning difficulties are also part of the disease. In a majority of patients, these impairments will progress to a stage where they have a significant impact on daily living and quality of life. There are interventions that could prevent, delay or reduce the burden of cognitive impairments. In order for people with PD to benefit from these interventions, those that are at risk of having cognitive impairments need to be identified early and accurately to be given the most appropriate care and services. Several studies show language difficulties in PD, more specifically in the comprehension of complex sentences and action words, like "run" and "swim". These are unique features of PD's cognitive profile in terms of their characteristics and the timing of their emergence in the course of the disease. They could help identify the onset of cognitive impairments earlier, and predict their progression more accurately. In this project, we will study the language performance of people who are or are not affected by PD, and who have or do not have cognitive impairments. Their language performance will be studied in relation with their performance in other domains of cognition (e.g., memory), their clinical profile (e.g., depression), and their brain function. Using brain imaging techniques, we will visualize which parts of the brain are active when participants perform a task in which they need to plan and perform switches between different rules, a capacity that would also be necessary to understand complex sentences. Overall, this study will show how language performance relates to the global cognitive profile of people who have and do not have PD. It will uncover the importance of including language tests in cognitive evaluation to ensure that people with PD receive the most appropriate care and services.