Language Impairment in English-Speaking Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease: A Role and Reference Grammar Contribution
Abstract
The linguistic aspects of Alzheimer’s disease have received much less attention from qualitative viewpoints than from quantitative research perspectives. For this reason, the present article proposes the application of the linking algorithm provided by Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) to a corpus from English-speaking patients with Alzheimer’s, namely the Pitt corpus. A sample of verb predicates from this corpus has been analyzed according to the steps provided by the grammar. Thus, the aims of this article are, on the one hand, to identify and describe the linguistic deficits found in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease and, on the other, to show the feasibility of this grammar in the description and possible early diagnosis of this neuro-degenerative disease. The results manifest a greater proportion of simple sentences with respect to coordinate, cosubordinate and subordinate sentences, as well as compensation strategies and problems with lexical retrieval.References
Altman, Douglas et al., eds. 2000. Statistics with Confidence. London: BMJ. Alzheimer’s Association. n.d. “Medical Tests for Diagnosing Alzheimer’s.”
Alzheimer ́s Association [Accessed February 21, 2022].
Bäckman, Lars et al. 2005. “Cognitive Impairment in Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease: A Meta-Analysis.” Neuropsychology 19 (4): 520-31.
Becker, James et al. 1994. “The Natural History of Alzheimer’s Disease: Description of Study Cohort and Accuracy of Diagnosis.” Archives of Neurology 51 (6): 585-94.
Burns, Alistair and Steve Iliffe. 2009. “Alzheimer’s Disease.” The BMJ 338 (1): 467-71.
Clarke, Natasha, Thomas R. Barrick and Peter Garrard. 2021. “A Comparison of Connected Speech Tasks for Detecting Early Alzheimer’s Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.” Frontiers in Computer Science 3: 634360.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Cortés Rodríguez, Francisco José, Carlos González Vergara and Rocío Jiménez Briones. 2012. “Las clases léxicas. Revisión de la tipología de predicados verbales.” In Mairal, Guerrero and González 2012, 59-84.
Creavin, Sam T. et al. 2016. “Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) for the Detection of Dementia in Clinically Unevaluated People Aged 65 and Over in Community and Primary Care Populations.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 1: CD01114.
Crystal, David. 1981. Clinical Linguistics. Berlin: Springer.
Dowty, David. 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel. Eyigoz, Elif et al. 2020. “Linguistic Markers Predict Onset of Alzheimer’s Disease.” EClinicalMedicine 28: 100583.
Fairclough, Isabela and Norman Fairclough. 2012. Political Discourse Analysis: A Method for Advanced Studies. London and New York: Routledge.
Folstein, Marshall F., Susan E. Folstein and Paul R. McHugh. 1975. “Mini-Mental State: A Practical Method for Grading the Cognitive State of Patients for the Clinician.” Journal of Psychiatric Research 12 (3), 189-98.
Fraser, Kathleen, Jed Meltzer and Frank Rudzicz. 2016. “Linguistic Feature Identify Alzheimer’s Disease in Narrative Speech.” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 49: 407-22.
Fyndanis, Valantis et al. 2013. “Agrammatic Patterns in Alzheimer’s Disease: Evidence from Tense, Agreement and Aspect.” Aphasiology 27 (2): 178-200.
Gallardo Paúls, Beatriz and Beatriz Valles González. 2008. “Lingüística en contextos clínicos: la lingüística clínica.” Lengua y Habla 12 (1): 32-50.
Gayraud, Frederique, Melissa Barkat-Defradas and Hyeran Lee. 2011. “Syntactic and Lexical Context of Pauses and Hesitations in the Discourse of Alzheimer Patients and Healthy Elderly Subjects.” Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 25 (3): 198-209.
Grasso, Lina, María del Carmen Díaz and Herminia Peraita. 2011. “Deterioro de la memoria semántico-conceptual en pacientes con enfermedad de Alzheimer. Análisis cualitativo y cuantitativo de los rasgos semánticos producidos en una tarea verbal de definición categorial.” Psicogeriatría 3 (4): 159-65.
Guerrero, José María et al. 2015. “Diagnosis of Cognitive Impairment Compatible with an Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease: A Bayesian Network Model Based on the Analysis of Oral Definitions of Semantic Categories.” Methods of Information in Medicine 55 (1): 42-49.
Hock, Hans Henrich, Walter Bisang and Werner Winter, eds. 2006. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Holme, Randal. 2009. Cognitive Linguistics and Language Teaching. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
King, James. 2012. “A Critical Review of Proposition Analysis in Alzheimer’s Research and Elsewhere.” Linguistics and Education 23 (4): 388-401.
Mairal, Ricardo, Lilián Guerrero and Carlos González Vergara, coords. 2012. El funcionalismo en la teoría lingüística. La Gramática del Papel y la Referencia. Madrid: Akal.
Malagón, Catalina et al. 2005. “Análisis del desempeño del lenguaje en sujetos con demencia tipo Alzheimer (DTA).” Revista de la Facultad de Medicina 53 (1): 3-9.
Manning, Christopher. 2015. “Computational Linguistics and Deep Learning.” Association for Computational Linguistics 41 (4): 701-707.
Martinkova, J. et al. 2021. “Proportion of Women and Reporting of Outcomes by Sex in Clinical Trials for Alzheimer Disease.” JAMA Neurology 4 (9): e2124124.
McAllister, Jan and Jim Miller. 2013. Introductory Linguistics for Speech and Language Therapy Practice. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Orimaye, Sylvester Olubolu, Jojo Sze-Meng Wong and Karen Jennifer Golden. 2014. “Learning Predictive Linguistic Features for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias Using Verbal Utterances.” In Resnik, Resnik and Mitchell 2014, 78-87.
Pavey, Emma. 2010. The Structure of Language: An Introduction to Grammatical Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Perkins, Michael. 2011. “Clinical Linguistics: Its Past, Present and Future.” Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 25 (11-12): 922-27.
Pistono, Aurélie et al. 2018. “Discourse Macrolinguistic Impairment as a Marker of Linguistic and Extralinguistic Functions Decline in Early Alzheimer’s Disease.” International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders 54 (3): 390-400.
— et al. 2019. “What Happens When Nothing Happens? An Investigation of Pauses as a Compensatory Mechanism in Early Alzheimer’s Disease.” Neuropsychologia 124: 133-43.
Resnik, Phillip, Rebeca Resnik and Margaret Mitchell, eds. 2014. Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality. Baltimore: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Rodríguez-Rojo, Inmaculada Concepción, Jorge Lugo-Marín and Francisco Javier Moreno-Martínez. 2015. “Category Specificity, Alzheimer Disease and Normative Studies: A Review and Several Recent Instruments for Spanish Speakers.” Austin Journal of Clinical Neurology 2 (7): 1058.
Smith, Carlota. 1997. The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Suárez-Rodríguez, Alejandro. 2021. “La Gramática del Papel y la Referencia aplicada a la enfermedad de Alzheimer: una aproximación basada en corpus.” RæL, Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada 20 (1): 114-35.
—. 2022. “La interfaz sintaxis-semántica y la lingüística clínica: el algoritmo de enlace de la Gramática del Papel y la Referencia en pacientes con Alzheimer.” Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna 45: 151-74.
Szatloczki, Greta et al. 2015. “Speaking in Alzheimer’s Disease, is that an Early Sign? Importance of Changes in Language Abilities in Alzheimer’s Disease.” Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 20 (7): 195.
Van Valin, Robert. 2005. Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
—. 2006. “Semantic Roles Universals and Argument Linking.” In Hock, Bisang and Winter 2006, 263-301.
—, ed. 2008. Investigations of the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
—. 2021. “Cosubordination.” In Van Valin 2021, 241-54.
—, ed. 2021. Challenges at the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: A Role and Reference Perspective. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
— and Randy LaPolla. 1997. Syntax: Structure, Meaning and Function. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Visch-Brink, Evy et al. 2004. “Naming and Semantic Processing in Alzheimer Dementia: A Coherent Picture?” Brain and Language 91 (1): 11-12.
Weiner, Myron F. et al. 2008. “Language in Alzheimer’s Disease.” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 69: 1223-27.
World Health Organization. 2021. “Dementia.” [Accessed February 21, 2022].
Zhu, Lin and Lihe Huang. 2020. “Pathological Verbal Repetition by Chinese Elders with Dementia of Alzheimer’s Type: A Functional Perspective.” East Asian Pragmatics 5 (2): 169-93.
Zvĕřová, Martina. 2019. “Clinical Aspects of Alzheimer’s Disease.” Clinical Biochemistry 72: 2-4.
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.