Coreferential processing in elderly with and without Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT

Purpose

To compare coreferential processing in elderly people with and without Alzheimer’s disease in Brazilian Portuguese.

Methods

Twelve elderly people without Alzheimer's (EA) and six elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease (EWA) participated in the study. The Mini-Mental State Examination was used for cognitive screening of participants. Two experiments were performed using the self-monitored reading technique to analyze coreference processing. Each contained eight experimental phrases and 24 distracting phrases, one of them using repeated pronouns and names and the other using hyponyms and hypernyms. After reading, questions were asked related to the content of the sentences. The main variable of interest was reading time, measured after the presentation of anaphoric resuming.

Results

In the first experiment, there were statistically significant results. The EA group processed the pronouns more quickly than repeated names. The volunteers of the EWA group were quicker in resuming repeated names. In the second experiment, the results show that the EA group showed preference for hypernyms in anaphoric resumption, whereas the EWA group did not present significant differences between conditions.

Conclusion

Elderly people without pathology processed pronouns and hypernyms more quickly compared to retrievals with repeated names and hyponyms, respectively, due to the smaller amount of semantic traits necessary to identify the antecedents in those conditions, as well as syntactic and discursive prominence. Elderly people with AD read names more readily than pronouns. There was no difference in anaphoric processing involving hyponyms and hypernyms, which may result from impaired working memory.

Keywords
Alzheimer’s Disease; Language; Speech Therapy; Psycholinguistics; Semantics

Descritores
Doença de Alzheimer; Linguagem; Fonoaudiologia; Psicolinguística; Semântica