Speech rate and syntactic complexity effects on the auditory comprehension of Alzheimer patients.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effects of speech rate and syntactic complexity on the auditory language comprehension of individuals with presumptive Alzheimer's disease, compared to healthy elderly controls. Three presentation rates and command statements of increasing syntactic complexity were used. Although rate of presentation did not significantly affect comprehension in either group, both groups demonstrated increased difficulty with stimuli of greater syntactic complexity, with Alzheimer's patients performing significantly poorer at all levels.