Incompleteness features in the descriptive discourse of Chinese elders with and without Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) can manifest itself with prominent language dysfunction. Incompleteness in discourse refers to the lack of indispensable sentence-constructing elements that hinder communication fluency and accuracy. The current study investigates how the pattern of incompleteness is associated with the descriptive discourse produced by elders withoutAD and those with different stages ofAD. The Chinese discourse samples were collected from the picture description of 40 elders with mild probableAD (Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) 21–26, Montreal Cognitive Assessment Scale-Basic (MoCA-B) 15–19), 40 elders with moderate probableAD (MMSE 11–20, MoCA-B 10–14), and 40 controls (MMSE 26–29, MoCA-B 24–29). The total production of incomplete sentences and six incompleteness features were examined. The MildAD, ModerateAD, and Control groups differed in the total output of the incomplete sentence. Group differences also emerged in four incompleteness features: missing subject, missing predicate, missing object, and missing functional word. The ModerateAD group differed from the MildAD group with respect to most significant features, while MildAD and Control groups were very similar. The results suggested thatAD impairs the sentence construction ability of Chinese elders, especially at the later stage. These statistically significant differences between the groups might provide some references when diagnosing the risk and possibility of cognitive impairment of Chinese elders, facilitating the design of clinical evaluation or screening for probableAD.

KEYWORDS:

• Language impairment
• incompleteness
• Alzheimer’s disease
• clinical evaluation
• gerontolinguistics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ THULAC http://thulac.thunlp.org/

² Chinese is classified as a SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) language, as it is in English.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the following funds: Major Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC) ‘The Study of Norm, Evaluation and Intervention of Chinese Elders’ Linguistic Competence’(21&ZD294), Database Project of Tongji Hospital of Tongji University (TJ(DB)2102), Clinical Research Project of Tongji Hospital of Tongji University (ITJ(ZD)2002), and Shanghai Shenkang Hospital Development Center Clinical Science and Technology Innovation Project (SHDC12021110).