Evaluation of macrolinguistic aspects of the oral discourse in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

INTRODUCTION

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a degenerative syndrome that impairs cognitive functioning, including speech and language. Discourse can be used to analyze language processing, which is organized into microlinguistic and macrolinguistic dimensions.

OBJECTIVES

To identify the occurrence of changes in the macrolinguistic dimension of oral discourse in AD patients.

Design

This was developed as a cross-sectional study.

Setting

Outpatient clinic of the Behavioural Neurology Division of São Paulo Federal University.

PARTICIPANTS

121 elderly patients, with ≥ 4 years of education, divided into AD and comparison groups.

MEASUREMENTS: The subjects were asked to create a narrative based on seven figures that made up a story. The macrolinguistic aspects of the narratives were analyzed.

RESULTS

The performance of the AD group was inferior to that of the comparison group on content-related, no-content-related complete and incomplete propositions as well as macropropositions, main information units, appropriated local and global coherence, cohesive devices and all subtypes, cohesive errors and some of their subtypes. Global coherence, macropropositions and ellipsis subtype of cohesive devices were the variables that best differentiated the groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Changes were observed in most aspects of the macrolinguistic dimension of oral discourse in patients with AD.