Lexical Skills in Alzheimer's Dementia (Based on the Material of Dialogue Utterances)

The paper discusses the lexical skills of adults with Alzheimer's dementia, assessed on the material of dialogue utterances. The paper presents a proposal for a way of describing lexical disorders in dementia and illustrates the problems commonly occurring in this group of patients. The linguistic analysis covered 1000 pages of transcripts of conversations with patients with moderate and severe intensity of dementia. In the discussion of the results, the most common symptoms of lexical disorders were presented that characterize functional behaviors in dementia: quasi-nomination with the use of the pronoun, transfer of a name, and delexicalization (dephraseologization). At the same time, the behaviors and reactions of patients were shown that appear in the situation of experiencing communication failures due to a decreased lexical skills.