Oral language and alzheimer's disease: A reduction in syntactic complexity

Transcripts of interviews with 117 adults undergoing examination for possible Alzheimer's disease were analyzed. the length, fluency, semantic content, and syntactic complexity of the transcripts varied with the severity of dementia. Although there was a marked increase in the production of sen...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 1994-12, Vol.1 (4), p.271-281
Main Authors: Lyons, Kelly, Kemper, Susan, Labarge, Emily, Ferraro, F. Richard, Balota, David, Storandt, Martha
Format: Article
Language:English
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Transcripts of interviews with 117 adults undergoing examination for possible Alzheimer's disease were analyzed. the length, fluency, semantic content, and syntactic complexity of the transcripts varied with the severity of dementia. Although there was a marked increase in the production of sentence fragments with dementia severity, approximately 60% of the utterances produced by the mildly demented adults were grammatically well formed, compared with 69% of those produced by the nondemented adults. the grammatical utterances of the mildly demented adults were shorter and syntactically simpler than those produced by the nondemented adults. These results add to the growing literature suggesting a relative preservation of some psycholinguistic functions in demented individuals.
ISSN:1382-5585
0928-9917
1744-4128
DOI:10.1080/13825589408256581