Discourse Informativeness in Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment

Abstract

In recent years, the assessment of the language abilities of persons with cognitive deficits has focused on discourse assessment. Specifically, the assessment of informativeness proves to be an effective diagnostic tool. This is an evaluation that combines a structuralist and functionalist approach to discourse analysis. The aim of this study is to evaluate discourse informativeness of persons with Alzheimer's dementia (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The research sample consists of 25 persons with AD, 25 persons with MCI and 25 healthy controls. Discourse samples are elicited using picture description. Main concept analysis is used to evaluate informativeness. The results show significant differences in the performance of the three groups of the research sample, with the most concepts being expressed by people from the control sample, followed by the MCI group, and the least concepts being expressed by the AD group. According to the results of the post-hoc test, there are significant differences in informativeness between AD and healthy controls, between MCI and healthy controls, and also between AD and MCI. Based on the results of the study, main concept analysis and thus the evaluation of informativeness appears to be a suitable method for capturing language difficulties in AD and MCI. The goal of further research should be a detailed elaboration of main concept analysis and its application to other elicitation materials commonly used in Slovak practice.