[Speech production in senile dementia].

Using a linguistic statistical method the speech of 14 patients suffering from senile dementia and its combination with cerebrovascular atherosclerosis was examined. A substantial diminution of the use of nouns, a relative preservance of the frequency of using verbs, and a more frequent use of adverbs, pronouns, and particles were revealed: this is characteristic of both acoustico-mnestic and sensor aphasia. It points to a greater activity of the secondary speech zones in the temporal lobe of the dominant hemisphere. It is assumed that the breakdown of the functional semantic connections between the verbs and the nouns in long-term memory forms the basis of verbal paraphasias. The indices of the lexic diversity and mean length of word demonstrate a pronounced impoverishment of the vocabulary and use of simple short words, as the dementia progresses. The substantial diminution of the frequency of using prepositions and conjunctions pointed to an impairment of the grammatical development stage in the mechanism of speech.