Narrative discourse in persons with Parkinson's disease

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Narrative discourse
• Idiopathic Parkinson disease
• Communication units
• Quantity of output
• Informativeness of output
• Syntactic aspects
• Kannada language

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank Prof. S.R. Savithri, Director, AIISH, Mysore for permitting to conduct the study. Due thanks are also rendered to all participants in the study.

Disclaimer statements

Contributors M.S.R.: planning the objectives of the study, setting of variable to measure, method, data entry, introduction and review process, results and discussion, and references. A.P.R.: planning the objectives of the study, method, data collection, data entry, statistics, review process, results, discussion, and references. S.N.: finalizing of objectives, method and variables; reviewing of introduction, review, method, results, and discussion.

Funding None.

Conflicts of interest None.

Ethics approval Ethical approval has been cleared.