Verbal repetitions and echolalia in Alzheimer's discourse

Abstract

This article reports on an investigation of echolalic repetition in Alzheimer's disease (AD). A qualitative analysis of data from spontaneous conversations with MHI, a woman with AD, is presented. The data come from the DALI Corpus, a corpus of spontaneous conversations involving subjects with AD. This study argues that echolalic effects can be explained through an analysis of their formal linguistic aspects, such as intonational-prosodic and enunciative-syntactic features. The analysis shows that the description of echolalic repetitions in these terms can help find parameters for the description of the linguistic and communicative characteristics of AD. This analysis even shows how a previous speech turn serves as a base for the elaboration of the next turn by the participant with AD. It also contributes to the understanding of echolalic productions in AD.