ORAL LANGUAGE AND ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE - A REDUCTION IN SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY

Transcripts of interviews with 117 adults undergoing examination for p ossible Alzheimer's disease were analyzed. The length, fluency, semant ic content, and syntactic complexity of the transcripts varied with th e severity of dementia. Although there was a marked increase in the pr oduction of sentence fragments with dementia severity, approximately 6 0% of the utterances produced by the mildly demented adults were gramm atically well formed, compared with 69% of those produced by the nonde mented adults. The grammatical utterances of the mildly demented adult s were shorter and syntactically simpler than those produced by the no ndemented adults. These results add to the growing literature suggesti ng a relative preservation of some psycholinguistic functions in demen ted individuals.