Disfluency patterns in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration

ABSTRACT

Disfluencies may reflect various mechanisms: word-finding difficulties, planning strategies, inter-individual cognitive variability, etc. In the current paper, we examined disfluency production in patients with a behavioural variant of Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (bvFTLD), compared to patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and healthy older adults. We showed that bvFTLD participants have lower speech rate and produce more incomplete utterances. However, those measures were not correlated with naming and fluency tasks. On the contrary, AD participants did not differ from healthy controls on disfluency production, but discourse measures were correlated with the participants’ lexical-semantic impairment. This provides evidence for different causes of disfluency in AD and FTLD, and a distinct role of each disfluency phenomenon.

KEYWORDS:

• Disfluency
• Alzheimer’s disease
• frontotemporal lobar degeneration
• discourse production

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.