Spontaneous language production in bilingual Parkinson’s disease patients: Evidence of greater phonological, morphological and syntactic impairments in native language

Nine early non-demented bilingual (L1 – Friulian, L2 – Italian) patients with Parkinson’s disease and nine normal controls matched for age, sex and years of education were studied on a spontaneous language production task. All subjects had acquired L1 from birth in a home environment and L2 at the age of six at school formally. Patients with PD evidenced more phonological, morphological and syntactic errors in L1 than in L2. The opposite pattern was observed in normal controls as far as grammar was concerned. These findings suggest that implicit language processing is more impaired than explicit language processing in Parkinson’s disease.