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Volume 8
Journal of Alzheimers Disease & Parkinsonism
ISSN: 2161-0460
Dementia 2018
October 29-31, 2018
October 29-31, 2018 | Valencia, Spain
12
th
International Conference on
Alzheimer’s Disease & Dementia
Ambiguous meaning boundary of words in Alzheimer’s disease
Hideharu Furumoto, Tohru Sakurai
and
Satsuki Nagase
National Hospital Organization Chiba Medical Center, Japan
A
lthough certain types of dementia such as progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), semantic dementia (SD), and logopenic
progressive aphasia (LPA) involve language dysfunction, most Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients have no trouble in verbal
communication. However, it is unclear whether they speak and perceive words in semantically the same manner as normal
people. To examine word meaning for AD we performed picture word matching task (VC 14,15) in 18 patients with AD and
11 controls and similarity decision task (VC 16,17) in 40 patients with AD and 15 Controls. All tasks are subtests of SALA (a
Japanese aphasia battery), which corresponds to PALPA in Europe. AD patients performed poorer than controls did in both
tasks (p<.005, p<.01, respectively). Moreover, more errors were found for verbs than for nouns (p<.05, p<.001, respectively).
However, the effect of similarity differed among the two tasks. In the picture-word matching task, more errors were observed
for semantically similar pairs than for dissimilar ones (p<.005). On the other hand, similarity had no major effect on the
similarity decision task (p=.161). Factually, direct comparison between the two tasks for 18 AD patients revealed significant
interaction between the similarity and task type (p<.001). In the latter task, AD patients often excessively associated the given
dissimilar words. They said everyone should wear a suit to go to hotel, so suit and hotel are similar or a dancer is shining, thus
dance and shine are similar. The results have shown not only the semantic difference between pictures and language but also
the ambiguous meaning boundary of words in AD.
J Alzheimers Dis Parkinsonism 2018, Volume 8
DOI: 10.4172/2161-0460-C7-055