Are language production problems apparent in adults who no longer meet diagnostic criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder?

Abstract

In this study, we examined sentence production in a sample of adults (N = 21) who had had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as children, but as adults no longer met DSM-IV diagnostic criteria (APA, 2000). This “remitted” group was assessed on a sentence production task. On each trial, participants saw two objects and a verb. Their task was to construct a sentence using the objects as arguments of the verb. Results showed more ungrammatical and disfluent utterances with one particular type of verb (i.e., participle). In a second set of analyses, we compared the remitted group to both control participants and a “persistent” group, who had ADHD as children and as adults. Results showed that remitters were more likely to produce ungrammatical utterances and to make repair disfluencies compared to controls, and they patterned more similarly to ADHD participants. Conclusions focus on language output in remitted ADHD, and the role of executive functions in language production.

Keywords:

• ADHD
• Language production
• Conceptual accessibility
• Grammatical encoding
• Partial remission
• Response inhibition

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Mhairi E. G. McMullon, Laurie A. Carr, and Elizabeth Davis for their help collecting and analyzing the data. This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health Grant R01-MH63146 awarded to Joel T. Nigg and Fernanda Ferreira.

Notes

¹ The ADHD-PH group is infrequent past adolescence and some even argue that this group does not exist in adults (Hart et al., 1995; Lahey, Pelham, Loney, Lee, & Willcutt, 2005; Milich, Balentine, & Lynam, 2001).

² Repetitions are cases in which a speaker stops speaking and then repeats something s/he has just said.

³ This interaction remains significant when both education and reading standard score are covaried.

⁴ This interaction remains significant when both education and reading standard score are covaried.