The purpose of this study was to describe a content-focused, easy-to-use method of analysing the discourse of persons with dementia. The method was applied to analyze the discourse of 10 normal aging subjects, 4 patients with vascular dementia and 9 w...
The purpose of this study was to describe a content-focused, easy-to-use method of analysing the discourse of persons with dementia. The method was applied to analyze the discourse of 10 normal aging subjects, 4 patients with vascular dementia and 9 with Alzheimer’s dementia, using 5 different types of discourse. Rules of demarcating subjects’ transcripts into utterances were presented.
For the structural analysis, the subjects were prompted to produce narrative discourses, procedural discourses, expository discourses, and conversational discourses. Items for the analysis included the following; total utterances (TU), Positive utterance is topic comment (TC), TC/TU and Negative utterance is topic comment digression (TCD), TCD/TU, off topic statement (OT), repetition (Rep), answer to a question (AQ), don’t know (DK), refusal (Ref), negative self-evaluation (NSE), anomia (ANOM), OT/TU. The subjects were also asked to describe a picture (”Beach”, K-WAB) to collect descriptive discourse samples. Analysis items in descriptive discourse were total words (TW), information words (IW), IW/TW, and topic comment grade (TCG).
The one-way ANOVA and LSD probe were performed to find the significant differences among three groups.
The results of this study are as follows; 1) the control group and the Alzheimer’s dementia group exhibited significant differences in TC, TCD, TC/TU, TCD/TU, OT, Rep, DK, and OT/TU; 2) the control group and the vascular dementia group showed significant differences in TC, TC/TU, and TCD/TU; 3 ) the vascular dementia group and Alzheimer’s dementia group exhibited significant differences in TU, TC/TU, and OT/TU.