Influence of structure on the content of oral narrative in adults with dementia of the Alzheimer's type.
Item
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Title
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Influence of structure on the content of oral narrative in adults with dementia of the Alzheimer's type.
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Identifier
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AAI9020754
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identifier
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9020754
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Creator
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Ehrlich, Jonathan Steven.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Loraine K. Obler
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Date
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1990
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Health Sciences, Speech Pathology | Speech Communication | Health Sciences, Mental Health
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Abstract
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The narrative production of adults with probable dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) was investigated in order to determine the extent to which cognitive or linguistic deficits explain the breakdown of discourse production. The structure of narrative tasks was manipulated such that the relationships among task structure and language production corresponded to predictions about the suspected origin of deficit. Sixteen DAT and 16 normal control subjects were administered four narrative tasks that were controlled for the amount of content and picture format display. Overall, the DAT subjects provided reduced content in terms of propositions and lexical items, shorter sentence length and more sentence fragments and reference errors than the controls. The mode of picture display influenced neither the amount of target content nor the grammatical performance. In contrast, the amount of information pictorially represented significantly influenced the content provided by the DAT adults such that relative to the normal controls they performed better when the message to be related contained relatively less information. These findings support the contributions of both semantic-lexical and ideational systems to narrative discourse production.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
