Pragmatic Knowledge in Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) consists of disorders of the memory and language changes which is mostly in syntactical functions and pragmatic-semantic functions. Via conversational analysis, it is easy to evaluate AD patients’ pragmatic skills. In this respect, the aim of this study is to analyse the pragmatic knowledge of AD patients by using a picture description test. In the evaluation, only the maxim of relation in Grice’s cooperative principle was considered. Speech samples were solicited from patients with AD (n=20) and age‐matched healthy people (n=20). Two extra raters made blind ratings on the evalution of the maxim of relation. Results demonstrate that the amount of speech of AD patients was less compared to the control group. The violation of relation maxim was rather higher in AD group and hereby it was certain that pragmatic language impairment was the reason of it.