Linguistics Department - School of Humanities, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Département de réadaptation, Faculté de médecine, Université Laval, Québec, Québec, Canada.
Folia Phoniatr Logop. 2024;76(4):340-351. doi: 10.1159/000534694. Epub 2023 Oct 25.
Discourse is one of the main linguistic aspects affected by Alzheimer's disease (AD), and its relationship with memory needs to be further studied, mainly in low education and low socioeconomic status groups. The present study aimed to investigate differences in the recall of short narratives between participants with mild AD and a control group (CG) of typical older adults (CG) with the use of automatic assessment.
Seventeen older adults diagnosed with AD (mean age 76.41, mean education 5.82) and 34 typical older adults (mean age 74.26, mean education 7.09) were asked to listen to and then retell a short story. Syntactic, lexical, and semantic features were assessed via the NILC-Metrix software, and the features were correlated with episodic, working, and semantic memory assessment.
Differences were found in 7 of the 34 features assessed. Syntactically, the group diagnosed with AD produced narratives with fewer sentences, fewer words per sentence, and lower Yngve depth scores. Lexically, the AD group produced narratives with fewer words and prepositions per sentence. Semantically, the narratives produced by the AD group featured words with a lower mean age of acquisition and lower Brunét's index scores. For the CG, episodic memory performance correlated with the ratio of conjunctions. No other significant correlation was found for semantic and working memory in the CG. No correlation was found between memory performance and linguistic features for the AD group.
The automatic assessment of linguistic features showed impaired narrative recall in participants diagnosed with AD relative to healthy controls at the syntactic, lexical, and semantic levels of discourse. These findings corroborate previous literature showing a decline in discourse production performance resulting from cognitive impairment in AD.
The assessment of linguistic performance through a narrative recall task provides valuable insights into cognitive decline related to AD.
话语是受阿尔茨海默病（AD）影响的主要语言方面之一，其与记忆的关系需要进一步研究，主要是在教育程度低和社会经济地位低的群体中。本研究旨在使用自动评估来研究轻度 AD 患者和典型老年对照组（CG）参与者在短叙事回忆方面的差异。
要求 17 名被诊断患有 AD 的老年人（平均年龄 76.41，平均受教育年限 5.82）和 34 名典型老年人（平均年龄 74.26，平均受教育年限 7.09）听一段短故事，然后复述。通过 NILC-Metrix 软件评估语法、词汇和语义特征，并将特征与情节、工作和语义记忆评估相关联。
在评估的 34 个特征中有 7 个存在差异。在语法方面，被诊断患有 AD 的组产生的叙述句子较少，每个句子的单词较少，Yngve 深度得分较低。在词汇方面，AD 组产生的叙述每个句子的单词和介词较少。在语义方面，AD 组产生的叙述所使用的单词具有较低的平均习得年龄和较低的 Brunét 指数得分。对于 CG，情节记忆表现与连词的比例相关。在 CG 中，语义和工作记忆没有其他显著的相关性。AD 组的记忆表现与语言特征之间没有相关性。
语言特征的自动评估显示，与健康对照组相比，被诊断患有 AD 的参与者在话语的语法、词汇和语义层面上的叙事回忆能力受损。这些发现与先前的文献一致，表明 AD 认知障碍导致话语生成能力下降。
通过叙事回忆任务评估语言表现为研究与 AD 相关的认知能力下降提供了有价值的见解。
