Small J A, Kemper S, Lyons K
Gerontology Center, University of Kansas, USA.
Psychol Aging. 1997 Mar;12(1):3-11. doi: 10.1037//0882-7974.12.1.3.
Caregivers of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are often advised to modify their speech to facilitate the patients' sentence comprehension. Three common recommendations are to (a) speak in simple sentences, (b) speak slowly, and (c) repeat one's utterance, using the same words. These three speech modifications were experimentally manipulated in order to investigate their individual and combined effects on sentence comprehension in AD. Fifteen patients with mild to moderate AD and 20 healthy older persons were tested on a sentence comprehension task with sentences varying in terms of (a) degree of grammatical complexity, (b) rate of presentation (normal vs. slow), and (c) form of repetition (verbatim vs. paraphrase). The results indicated a significant decline in sentence comprehension for the AD group. Sentence comprehension improved, however, after the sentence was repeated in either verbatim or parapharsed form. However, the patients' comprehension did not improve for sentences presented at the slow speech rate. This pattern of results is explained via-à-vis the patients' working memory loss. The findings challenge the appropriateness of several clinical recommendations.
被诊断患有阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者的照料者通常会被告知调整自己的言语方式，以帮助患者理解句子。常见的三条建议是：（a）用简单句说话；（b）语速放慢；（c）逐字重复自己说过的话。为了研究这三种言语调整方式对AD患者句子理解的单独及综合影响，对其进行了实验操作。15名轻度至中度AD患者和20名健康老年人参与了一项句子理解任务测试，所使用的句子在以下方面存在差异：（a）语法复杂程度；（b）呈现速度（正常语速与慢速）；（c）重复形式（逐字重复与意译）。结果表明，AD组的句子理解能力显著下降。然而，句子以逐字重复或意译形式重复后，理解能力有所提高。但是，对于以慢速呈现的句子，患者的理解能力并未提高。针对这一结果模式，从患者工作记忆丧失的角度进行了解释。这些发现对一些临床建议的适用性提出了质疑。
