Browsing by Author "Parkkinen, Johanna"

The purpose of this study is to examine if the Alzheimer's disease's (AD's) advancement affects the vocabulary used in diaries. This is achieved by concentrating on use of parts of speech. The changes caused by AD in written Finnish language have not been studied thoroughly, unlike the changes in spoken language. Also internationally, research on the current topic is sparse and in the existing studies, the main focus has been on spoken language and specific parts of speech. For example, the studies have concentrated solely on verbs, nouns or pronouns. Thus, there is need for a study, taking all parts of speech into account. The data used in this research are the diaries of an AD patient written during years from 1986 to 2012. From this data, the entries written on June of 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012 were examined. The selected diary entries were handled using quantitative methods with a custom made Python program. This approach allowed to effectively calculate and compare the use of parts of speech between the examined years. By examining the results, it was noticed that the division of written words between the parts of speech remained almost the same on every year examined. The most common part of speech was nouns, followed by verbs, adverbs, particles, adpositions. The number of diary entries and their lengths decreased from year 1986 to year 2012. The relative fractions of parts of speech remained stable, except for pronouns. The fraction of pronouns increased with the advancement of the disease. This supports the results of previous studies about the usage of pronouns by AD patients. This study is a part of a larger research project, and one of the first case studies handling the written language and AD in Finland. Further investigation in Finnish improves the knowledge on AD, advances the detection methods of AD and allows the use of new methods in rehabilitation.