Towards a modular description of the deficits in spontaneous speech in dementia

Abstract

In research concerning language and dementia, most investigators agree on the following: In addition to deficits in lexical access, one of the first and major problems of patients with Alzheimer's Dementia lies above the sentence level, that is in pragmatics. It is, however, still controversial whether the ‘language deficit’ of demented persons is indeed a result of their diminished language abilities or whether it should be described as a problem secondary to other cognitive deficits. The exact nature of this deficit is still unclear. The following study presents some data which show that discourse performance of patients suffering from dementia may be selectively disturbed. This is taken as an argument for modular pragmatics. Ratings of adequacy of different discourse components reveal that most patients perform normally with respect to some pragmatic criteria, while they show deficiencies in others. Such an individual variation is not found in healthy control subjects. Some consequences of this result will be discussed.