# PROCESSING RESOURCES & SENTENCE COMPREHENSION IN DAT

> **NIH NIH R01** · MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL · 1992 · $225,092

## Abstract

It is now known that patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type
often show impaired language abilities. Most researchers agree that
these patients have difficulty naming objects and comprehending words.
However,  there is disagreement about whether their sentence
comprehension abilities are impaired. The results of our preliminary
studies support the view that DAT patients have only minimal difficulty
in understanding the literal meaning of a sentence but a substantial
impairment in situations requiring them to use the meaning   derived
from a sentence to perform tasks such as verifying whether a sentence is
plausible. In addition, preliminary data from studies in which we have
asked patients to understand sentences while performing another task
(such as following a sequence of dots or digits on a computer screen)
supports the hypothesis that these sentence comprehension impairments
result from a reduction in the processing resources available to DAT
patients to accomplish these tasks. The proposed research will extend
these preliminary studies in three ways. First, we will use a wide range
of sentence types and sentence comprehension tasks, to see if the
results generalize to other sentences and tasks. Second, we will use a
wider range of concurrent tasks, to allow us to study the effects on
sentence comprehension of tasks that vary in their processing resource
requirements and in the degree to which they overlap cognitively with
the sentence comprehension task. Third, we will investigate possible
trade-offs in subjects' allocating processing resources to only one task
in dual-task situations, by generating Performance Operating Curves in
dual-task situations. This will allow us to interpret the effect of
dual-task conditions on sentence comprehension more clearly. The
proposed studies will provide data that test two hypotheses: (a) the
patients with DAT have little difficulty with tasks simply requiring
them to obtain the literal meaning of sentences but greater difficulty
with tasks that required them to use meaning obtained for other
purposes, and (b)  that the impairments these patients show on these
tasks result from a reduction in the processing resources they can
devote to sentence comprehension.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 3121569
- **Project number:** 1R01AG009661-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
- **SAM.gov UEI:** FLJ7DQKLL226
- **Principal Investigator:** David Norman Caplan
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1992
- **Award amount:** $225,092
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 1992-05-01 → 1997-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/3121569

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 3121569, PROCESSING RESOURCES & SENTENCE COMPREHENSION IN DAT (1R01AG009661-01A1). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/3121569. Licensed CC0.

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