Neural signatures of predictive language processing in parkinson’s disease with and without mild cognitive impairment León-Cabrera, Patricia Morís Fernández, Joaquín This study was funded by grants from the Fundació la Marató de TV3 2014/U/477 and 20142910, and by financial support from the Center for Biomedical Research and Neurodegenerative Resources (CIBERNED). PLC was funded with a pre-doctoral grant FPU15/05554 (FPU "Ayudas para la Formación de Profesorado Universitario") of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. JP was funded by PERIS (expedient number: SLT008/18/00088) of Generalitat de Catalunya. JK and HB-K were funded by FIS PI18/01717. HB -K was funded by Río Hortega CM17/00209 of Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) (Spain). JM was funded by Río Hortega CM15/00071 of Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) (Spain). None of these funding sources had any involvement in the conduct of the research or the preparation of the article. Cognitive deficits are common in Parkinson’s disease (PD), with some PD patients meeting criteria for mild cognitive impairment (MCI). An unaddressed question is whether linguistic prediction is preserved in PD. This ability is nowadays deemed crucial in achieving fast and efficient comprehension, and it may be negatively impacted by cognitive deterioration. To fill this gap of knowledge, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to evaluate mechanisms of linguistic prediction in a sample of PD patients (on dopamine compensation) with and without MCI. To this end, participants read sentence contexts that were predictive or not about a sentence-final word. The final word appeared after 1 second, matching or mismatching the prediction. The introduction of the interval allowed to capture neural responses both before and after sentence-final words, reflecting semantic anticipation and processing. PD patients with normal cognition (N = 58) showed ERP responses comparable to those of matched controls. Specifically, in predictive contexts, a slow negative potential developed prior to sentence-final words, reflecting semantic anticipation. Later, expected words elicited reduced N400 responses (compared to unexpected words), indicating facilitated semantic processing. Besides, PD patients with MCI (N = 20) showed a prolongation of the N400 congruency effect (compared to matched PD patients without MCI), indicating that further cognitive decline impacts semantic processing. Finally, lower verbal fluency scores correlated with prolonged N400 congruency effects and with reduced pre-word differences in all PD patients (N = 78). This relevantly points to a role of deficits in temporal-dependent mechanisms in PD, besides prototypical frontal dysfunction, in altered semantic anticipation and semantic processing during sentence comprehension. 2021-09-29T12:20:20Z 2021-09-29T12:20:20Z 2021 info:eu-repo/semantics/article bioRxiv 2020.11.23.392647; [doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.11.23.392647] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/70533 10.1101/2020.11.23.392647 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España