Browsing by Author "Jauhiainen, Katja"

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia in Finland. Very early on, it can impair the linguistic and cognitive abilities. Dysgraphia, the disorder in writing, is a common symptom in Alzheimer’s disease. There has been little research on dysgraphia and texts written by people suffering from dementia in Finland, and presumably no research has been done previously regarding the cohesion of written texts. The aim of this study is to examine, if the number of cohesive devices, the linguistic devices creating cohesion, changes in the diary entries written by a person with Alzheimer’s disease as the disease progresses, and if it is possible to see the outset of the possible changes. The data of this study were the diaries written by a person with Alzheimer’s disease during the years 1967–2012. The diary entries written in June 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012 were selected for the analysis. The number of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices as well as the number of exophoric pronouns or the pronouns referring to the extralinguistic situation in the diary entries was counted. The IBM SPSS Statistics 24 program was used for the quantitative analysis of the data. A scatter diagram of the number of the cohesive devices was created, and a line of best fit was added to the diagram in order to demonstrate the temporal changes. The correlation between the number of cohesive devices and years was measured with Spearman’s rho or Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The study showed that the number of all grammatical cohesive devices, exophora, anaphora or the expression that depends upon an antecedent expression and reiteration seemed to have increased as time passed by. The number of all lexical cohesive devices, collocation or the semantically related words and ellipsis or the omission of words seemed to have decreased. The results were not statistically significant. The changes seemed to have begun year 2001, but the result was inaccurate, because the data varied considerably. The writing style of the person with Alzheimer’s disease resembled note taking, which influenced the occurrence of cohesive devices. Examining the spontaneously written texts by people with dementia provides more knowledge of the effects of dementia on the linguistic abilities and the possibility to develop diagnostic tools for the speech-language pathologists.