چکیده:
Objective: The use of cohesive devices makes discourse comprehend. However, in the discourse of senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type (SDAT) participants, the lack of the use of cohesive devices hinders effective communication. The present study aims to investigate cohesion in the discourse of SDAT participants. Understanding how these people manage their interactions may lead to suitable approaches for them. Method: The methodology of this quantitative research was ex post facto type. The present study has been performed in one of the nursing home in Kermanshah in 2019. And also, the statistic population of this study included 20 participants (10 SDAT participants and 10 normal elderly participants (NE)) who were matched based on age (63-75 years old), gender, illiteracy, and Kurdish language (Kalhori dialect) speaker. To determine the severity of dementia, the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale (CDR) was performed. Then, the collected interviews were transcribed and coded. The data were analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan's theory (1976) and independent t-test was used to obtain the statistic results. Results: The findings indicate significant differences between groups using grammatical cohesive devices, such as reference (p=0.006), conjunction (p=0.004), ellipsis (p=0.007), and substitution (p=0.426) and lexical cohesive devices such as the same word (p=0.006), synonym (p=0.012), superordinate (p=0.001), general word (p=0.002), and collocation (p=0.387). Conclusion: The results show that grammatical and lexical cohesive devices are used less in the discourse of SDAT Kurdish speakers. However, in the discourse of both SDAT and NE groups, grammatical cohesive devices have more frequency than lexical cohesive devices.
خلاصه ماشینی:
However, in the discourse of Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer’s Type (SDAT) patients, the lack of the use of cohesive devices hinders effective communication.
Clinical Linguistics, Discourse Impairing, Alzheimer’s Disease, Lexical Cohesion, Grammatical Cohesion Introduction The speed of learning words and concepts in the early years of life is so rapid and precise that it never seems they are removed from the mind or it is difficult to remind them.
De Lira, Minett, Bertolucci, and Ortiz (2018) evaluated macro linguistic aspects in the oral discourse of patients with Alzheimer whose results showed the performance of SDAT in cohesive devices and all its subtypes was reduced, and cohesive devices were the best variables to show the difference between SDAT and NE groups.
Golbaz (2008) investigated the discourse feature of Persian speakers with Alzheimer’s to show that there was a significant difference between the SDAT and NE participants in the use of cohesive devices in the discourse of Alzheimer patients.
Ahangar, Jafarzadeh Fadaki and Sehhati (2016) studied lexical relations devices in speech of SDAT and NE participants and the results of the analysis indicated that there is no significant difference in applying these devices in the discourse of SDAT and NE in their collocation and lexical relations.
The results of the study reveal that this kind of difference indicates the effects of Alzheimer disease on employing the lexical relation device of speech for SDAT participants.
Findings The findings showed that there was a significant difference between the use of the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in both SDAT and NE groups.