A corpus-based dependency study of the syntactic complexity in the connected speech of Alzheimer’s disease

Background While numerous studies observed notable changes in syntactic complexity among individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD), these studies predominantly concentrated on isolated internal structures of language but rarely defined the syntactic complexity variation in AD on a continuum. Given that working memory load exhibits a continuous rather than binary pattern in populations and plays a crucial role in syntactic processing and generation, research on syntactic complexity changes in AD could benefit from expanding to include this perspective.