Abstract
Dementia is characterized by the breakdown of intellectual and communicative functioning accompanied by personality change (DSM IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Persons with dementia often experience difficulty in naming skills which can be attributed to semantic memory deficits. This can further influence various linguistic expressions such as lexical and morphological structures. The present study aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the presence of different types of verb inflections in bilingual (Kannada-English) persons with mild dementia. Considered for the study were 10 healthy elderly and 10 persons with mild dementia who were Kannada-English bilinguals. Spontaneous, conversational speech in all the participants was transcribed from which different types of verb inflexions in Kannada were extracted and analyzed. They included infinite verb, imperative verbs, negative imperatives, optative, and participle verbs. These were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed for mean number of verbs and their nature including code mixing and switching identifying the significant differences between the two groups of participants. Results suggest that these measures offer a sensitive method for differentiating persons with mild dementia from healthy elderly. The study further helps in delineating prognostic indicator and planning rehabilitative measures which can be helpful tool for management.
Highlights
Dementia is a debilitating condition which causes progressive deterioration in language, cognitive, and behavioral skills
The results are described under two phases and are presented with respect to the groups viz Health Elderly (HE) and Persons With Dementia (PWD). 3.1 Phase I: The Measures Related to Expression of Verbs Table 4 illustrates the results of descriptive statistics for the measures related to expression of verbs with respect to the two groups
The results showed significant difference for Optative verb between persons with Alzheimer’s disease and vascular type dementia (|z|=0.039; p
Summary
Dementia is a debilitating condition which causes progressive deterioration in language, cognitive, and behavioral skills. Anomia is the first symptom observed in persons with dementia They exhibit difficulty in coming up with words in structural tasks such as word list generation, as well as in elicited narratives and spontaneous conversation (Nicholas, Obler, Albert, & Helm-Estabrooks, 1985; Kempler, Curtiss, & Jackson, 1987). Almor, Kempler, Andersen, Tyler, and MacDonald (1999) associated discourse impairments in persons with dementia to the deficits in working memory They stated that the speech of persons with Alzheimer type dementia contained more pronouns than the speech of healthy participants. Mendez, Perryman, Ponton and Cummings (1999) studied 51 bilingual persons with dementia These individuals presented an evident tendency for words and phrases from native language to intrude into English conversational speech. Further the study explored the nature of code mixing and code switching in their utterances
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