Spontaneous Speech Traits in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

Kim, Jungwan; Kim, HyangHee; Namkoong, Kee; Kim, Sejoo; Kim, Deogyoung

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2006;11(3): 82-98.

Jungwan Kim^` , HyangHee Kim^` , Kee Namkoong^` , Sejoo Kim^` , and Deogyoung Kim^`

김정완(Jungwan Kim)| 김향희(HyangHee Kim)| 남궁기(Kee Namkoong)| 김세주(Sejoo Kim)| 김덕용(Deogyoung Kim)

ABSTRACT

The linguistic characteristics of Dementia of the Alzheimer’s Type(DAT) are difficult to determine through formal language tests, and sometimes the conversational ability may appear fluent. Accordingly, to differentiate DAT patients from normal elderly and to investigate the linguistic degradation resulting from dementia, analysis of spontaneous speech is needed. In this study, single-picture and sequencing-picture descriptions tasks were administered to 30 DAT subjects, separated into 3 subgroups by DAT severity stage, and to 15 normal controls, followed by an investigation of differences in production of spontaneous speech in accordance with DAT severity. In terms of spontaneous speech, there were significant differences among the DAT subgroups. The factor giving the greatest discrimination among the control group and 3 DAT subgroups was ‘succeeding utterance start time’, followed by ‘percentage of CIU’, ‘phonemic paraphasia’, and ‘words/utterances’. The utterance characteristics factor demonstrated an ability level of 84.4% in discriminating significant differences between the control group and 3 DAT subgroups. In conclusion, a comparison of the general spontaneous speech ability between 3 DAT subgroups and a control group revealed that the severity of dementia could be ascertained through a systemic analysis of spontaneous speech. In addition, we observed the clinical significance of spontaneous speech analysis in the clinical setting where early differential diagnosis and therapeutic measures are important.