Lexical diversity in Parkinson’s disease

BACKGROUND: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative syndrome of the basal ganglia (BG) believed to disrupt cortical-subcortical pathways critical to motor, cognitive and expressive language function. Recent studies have shown subtle deficits in expressive language performance among individuals with PD even in the earliest stage of the disease. The objective of this study was to use measures of lexical diversity to examine expressive language performance during discourse production in a sample of individuals with PD. METHODS: Twelve individuals with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) were compared to twelve matched, neurologically intact controls on measures of lexical diversity. Three minute discourse samples describing a typical day were collected and analyzed for lexical diversity with the CHILDES program using measures of type token ratio (TTR) and voc-D (D). RESULTS: Comparisons of three minute discourse samples indicated non-significant differences between individuals with PD and controls in word productivity (387 vs 356; p = .48). Similarly, there were also non-significant differences on measures of lexical diversity between the two groups (TTR = .45 vs.44; p = .50 and D 74 vs 68; p = .23). CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that lexical diversity during discourse production among individuals with PD is similar to non-neurological controls. These findings indicate that lexical diversity is an aspect of expressive language performance that is not impacted by the disease process in the earliest stages.