Naming ability in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease: what changes occur with the evolution of the disease?

Abstract

OBJECTIVES:Naming deficit is a linguistic symptom that appears in the initial phase of Alzheimer's disease, but the types of naming errors and the ways in which this deficit changes over the course of the disease are unclear. We analyzed the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease on naming tasks during the mild and moderate phases and verified how this linguistic skill deteriorates over the course of the disease.METHODS:A reduced version of the Boston Naming Test was administered to 30 patients with mild Alzheimer's disease, 30 patients with moderate Alzheimer's disease and 30 healthy controls. Errors were classified as verbal semantic paraphasia, verbal phonemic paraphasia, no response (pure anomia), circumlocution, unrelated verbal paraphasia, visual errors or intrusion errors.RESULTS:The patients with moderate Alzheimer's disease had significantly fewer correct answers than did both the control group and the group with mild Alzheimer's disease. With regard to the pattern of errors, verbal semantic paraphasia errors were the most frequent errors in all three groups. Additionally, as the disease severity increased, there was an increase in the number of no-response errors (pure anomia). The group with moderate Alzheimer's disease demonstrated a greater incidence of visual errors and unrelated verbal paraphasias compared with the other two groups and presented a more variable pattern of errors.CONCLUSIONS:Performance on nominative tasks worsened as the disease progressed in terms of both the quantity and the type of errors encountered. This result reflects impairment at different levels of linguistic processing.

Lexical Substitution and Paraphasia in Advanced Dementia of the Alzheimer Type

“…The specific peculiarities of speech processing in AD patients were described in connection with the brain damage (Cera, Ortiz, Bertolucci, & Minett, 2013;Schecker, Kochler, Schmidtke, & Rauh, 2014). Mild AD and moderate AD patients performed the Boston Naming Test with a statistically significant deviation compared to a control group as well as to each other (Silagi, Bertolucci, & Ortiz, 2015). The main peculiarities of speech generation in AD patients were found; nevertheless, the spontaneous verbal behavior of the patients differs from the carefully controlled test performance.…”

“…It is obvious that the semantic similarity with the target word foregrounds a substitution, and phonetic parallels in the current context lead to paraphasias. According to (Silagi, Bertolucci, & Ortiz, 2015), the number of semantically unrelated verbal paraphasias significantly increased in a group of moderate AD patients, while appearance of phonetically similar substitutions for a target word did not match statistical criteria in ANOVA (Silagi, Bertolucci, & Ortiz, 2015, p. 425 , Table 1). Severe brain damage causes more problems in object recognition and word recollection.…”

La habilidad léxico-semántica en la Enfermedad de Alzheimer: Un estudio de la fluidez verbal con categorías semánticas

“…La alteración del lenguaje es una de las manifestaciones más destacadas y tempranas de la Enfermedad de Alzheimer (Schröder, Wendelstein & Felder, 2010). Las investigaciones más recientes han demostrado que el deterioro del lenguaje en EA es integral y afecta todos los niveles del sistema lingüístico y sus manifestaciones: la fonética segmental y suprasegmental (Mesulman, Rogalski, Wieneke, Hurley, Geula, Bigio, Thompson & Weintraub, 2014;Martínez-Sánchez, Meilán, Vera-Ferrandiz, Carro, Pujante-Valverde, Ivanova & Carcavilla, 2017); el nivel léxico y el nivel semántico (Szatloczki, Hoffmann, Vincze, Kálmán & Pakaski, 2015;Lima Silagi et al, 2015); la gramática y la sintaxis (Ahmed, de Jager, Haigh & Garrard, 2012;Ivanova, 2015); así como la construcción del discurso (Pistono, Jucla, Barbeau, Saint-Aubet, Lemesle, Calvet, Köpke, Puel & Pariente, 2016). Dentro de este cuadro de afectación lingüística compleja, las alteraciones léxico-semánticas ocupan un lugar destacado, tanto por su mayor evidencialidad en la expresión verbal de los hablantes como por su papel central en la caracterización del lenguaje en EA.…”

El análisis de las relaciones discursivas como recurso en el seguimiento de la Enfermedad de Alzheimer

“…Si partimos desde los niveles de la lengua, quizás el nivel más estudiado para la Demencia tipo Alzheimer sea el léxico-semántico, nivel cuyo detrimento empieza desde las primeras etapas con el empobrecimiento de vocabulario, su fluidez y anomalías en el lexicón (Silagi, Bertolucci & Ortiz, 2015;Kavé & Goral, 2018). El escueto desempeño léxico se halla en el deterioro de la memoria semántica, la incapacidad para generar estructuras conceptuales prelingüísticas y la ruptura entre el concepto semántico y el referente (Ralph, Watson, Powis, Patterson & Hodges, 2001;Grasso, Díaz & Peraita, 2011;Szatloczki, Hoffmann, Vincze, Kálmán & Pakaski, 2015).…”