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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Sentence comprehension in Alzheimer's disease
— effects of grammatical complexity, speech rate, and repetition | | Author(s) | Jeff A Small, Susan Kemper, Kelly Lyons |
| Journal title | Psychology and Aging, vol 12, no 1, March 1997 |
| Pages | pp 3-11 |
| Keywords | Cognitive processes ; Dementia ; Memory and Reminiscence ; Informal care ; Communication skills ; Testing ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are often advised to modify their speech, to facilitate patients' sentence comprehension. Speaking in simple sentences, speaking slowly, and repeating one's utterances using the same words are commonly recommended. These speech modifications were experimentally manipulated, to investigate their individual and combined effects on sentence comprehension, with 15 patients with mild to moderate dementia and 20 healthy older people, in terms of degree of grammatical complexity, rate of presentation, and form of repetition (verbatim vs. paraphrase). Results indicate a significant decline in comprehension for the AD group. Their comprehension improved after the sentence was repeated in either verbatim or paraphrased form. However, slow speech rate did not improve their comprehension. This pattern of results is explained in terms of patients' memory loss. The findings challenge the appropriateness of several clinical recommendations. |
| Accession Number | CPA-971120232 A |
| Classmark | DA: EA: DB: P6: UO: 3T: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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