Narrative discourse in persons with Parkinson's disease

Objectives: There are a limited number of studies examining participants with Parkinson's disease (PD) in the Indian context. This study investigates narrative discourse skills in terms of quantity, syntactic aspects and informativeness of output in Kannada-speaking persons with idiopathic PD. Methods: Two groups comprising 12 Kannada-speaking individuals with idiopathic PD in the age range of 60-85 years and 12 neuro-typical individuals matched on age, sex, socio-economic status, language, dialect, and knowledge of other languages participated in the study. To assess their narrative skills, participants were provided with a series of eight pictures to narrate a story for a minimum of 2-3 minutes. The samples were transcribed orthographically. The transcribed samples were divided into communication units and were analyzed in terms of the quantity, informativeness of output and the syntactic aspects. Results: The results revealed that there was a significant difference between the two groups on most of the communication units such as the number of syntactic units, mean length of utterance, percentage of simple and compound sentences, percentage of correct informative units and informative utterances, but not for the total number of words, percentage of grammatical words, and complex sentences. Conclusion: Based on the results it can be concluded that the narrative discourse skills of Kannada speakers with idiopathic PD were affected.