Neils J, Roeltgen D P, Greer A
Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Cincinnati, OH, USA.
Brain Lang. 1995 Jun;49(3):241-62. doi: 10.1006/brln.1995.1032.
The present study was conducted to investigate the spelling ability of persons affected by mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). AD subjects produced more phonemically implausible (PI) spelling errors (e.g. enough-->enougigh) than normal subjects; in addition, AD subjects produced a higher percentage of PI spelling errors than normal AD subjects. We found that two clinical visual attention tests were better predictors of the number of PI spelling errors than a language measure. Moreover, we also found that AD subjects performed more poorly when they copied words that were viewed and removed from sight than when the same words were copied directly. In contrast, there was no significant difference in the performance of the normal elderly on direct and delayed copying tasks. AD subjects produced more errors when spelling long words than when spelling short words. Although the spelling performance of the normal elderly was also affected by the length of the words spelled, AD subjects showed a significantly greater drop in performance than normal subjects when the length of the words increased. The vocabulary of the short and long word lists did not differ in frequency of occurrence or imagability (i.e. abstractness). The results suggest that visual attention impairment and not language impairment accounts for the PI spelling errors of mild AD subjects. The results are discussed with reference to graphemic buffer deficits identified in case studies of stroke patients with dysgraphia.
本研究旨在调查轻度阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者的拼写能力。与正常受试者相比，AD患者产生的语音不合理（PI）拼写错误（例如enough-->enougigh）更多；此外，AD患者产生的PI拼写错误百分比高于正常受试者。我们发现，两项临床视觉注意力测试比一项语言测试能更好地预测PI拼写错误的数量。此外，我们还发现，与直接抄写相同单词相比，AD患者在抄写看过并从视线中移除的单词时表现更差。相比之下，正常老年人在直接抄写和延迟抄写任务中的表现没有显著差异。AD患者拼写长单词时比拼写短单词时产生的错误更多。尽管正常老年人的拼写表现也受所拼写单词长度的影响，但当单词长度增加时，AD患者的表现下降幅度明显大于正常受试者。短单词列表和长单词列表的词汇在出现频率或可想象性（即抽象性）方面没有差异。结果表明，视觉注意力受损而非语言受损是轻度AD患者PI拼写错误的原因。结合中风后书写障碍患者病例研究中确定的字形缓冲缺陷对结果进行了讨论。
