The Comparison of Morpho-Syntactic Patterns Device Comprehension in Speech of Alzheimer and Normal Elderly People

Alzheimer’s disease can give rise to aphasia and difficulties with word finding, naming, and word comprehension. Also it can affect the comprehension of morpho-syntactic patterns device as one of cohesive devices.
The purpose of this research is to investigate and compare the comprehension of sub-devices of morpho-syntactic patterns in the speech of Persian-speaking elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease and the normal elderly based on Dooley and Levinson’s perspective. Sub-devices of morpho-syntactic patterns include consistency of inflectional categories, echoic utterances and discourse-pragmatic structuring.
This descriptive-analytic and cross-sectional research conducted on the speech of 12 elderly people comprising 6 Alzheimer and 6 normal individuals 74 to 90 years old who were selected using available sampling method. The data was analyzed by SPSS software and T-test.
The findings indicate, except for the consistency of inflectional categories (P = 0.017), in other two subsets including echoic utterances (P = 0.411) and discourse-pragmatic structuring (P = 0.245). However, in overall analysis of this device (P = 0.026).
This study supports the conclusion that there is a significant difference between the comprehension of Morpho-syntactic patterns device as a whole in the speech of Persian speaking Alzheimer’s and normal elderly people.