Verbal behavior in Alzheimer disease patients: Analysis of phrase repetition

Language problems in the elderly with AD are due to the fact that deterioration occurs not only in semantic memory, but in a group of cognitive factors, evidenced by a deficiency in search strategies for linguistic information. Objectives: To evaluate phrase repetition in two cognitive tests, the MMSE and MoCA, in a group of Alzheimer disease patients (AD) and normal controls. Methods: A Cross-sectional study was conducted involving 20 patients who sought medical assistance at a geriatric institute in Jundiaí, São Paulo. The subjects underwent a detailed clinical examination and neuropsychometric evaluation. All subjects with AD met DSM-IV and NINCDS-ADRDA criteria. Ten patients received a diagnosis of AD and 10 were healthy subjects, forming the control group (CG). Results: All participants correctly answered the phrase from the MMSE (phrase 1). The MoCA phrases (phrases 2 and 3) were correct in 80% and 90%, respectively in the CG and in 40% and 50%, respectively in the AD group. Conclusions: The MoCA test proved more effective in evaluating the echoic behavior in AD patients compared to the MMSE. The simpler phrase repetition task in the MMSE was found to be less sensitive in detecting mild language decline in AD patients.

On the Echolalia of the Blind and of the Autistic Child

Of the multiple manifestations of childhood echolalia, two are remarkably similar and unique from other types: echolalia of the autistic child and of a subpopulation of the infant blind. From case studies of the echoic blind a rationale is developed to account for these similarities and for the common bases of the behavior in both conditions. Among the variables examined are the human desire for communication, development of an audiovocal skill, arrested language development, profound difficulties in verbal comprehension and self-differentiation, consequences of sensory restriction from birth, and parental reactions to these handicaps. It is concluded that the direct effects of sensory restriction in the blind (and perhaps perceptual restriction in the autistic) tend to delay or preclude acquisition of the meaning and structure systems of language. Nevertheless, the quasisocial echoic behavior persists, reflecting the human drive to participate in communication by speech.

Auditory Assembly of Segmented Sentences by Children

Imitative performance on an assembly task consisting of six sentences, four to nine words in length, in which words in the sentences were separated by one of four conditions of pause-time (silent intervals of 125, 250, 500, and 750 msec), was compared to performance on the same six sentences spoken normally (N). Tape recordings of these five conditions were played to 75 preschool children instructed to repeat them. Results suggest that insertion of silent intervals in sentences does not overwhelm the child’s perceptual mechanism. Children are able to encode the disrupted stimulus with normal intonation prosodic patterns. Error patterns vary regularly with sentence length and lexical item-type in normal and interrupted sentences. Segmented sentences, as he perceives and reproduces them, do reflect upon a child’s knowledge of grammar. Silent intervals do make echoic behavior more difficult.

Errors in the Echoic Behavior of Preschool Children

Ninety children were divided equally into three age groups ranging at full-year intervals from 3.0 to 5.9 years of age. The subjects were given a test of echoic behavior consisting of 22 consonants coupled with each of two vowels to form consonant-vowel nonsense syllables. Analysis indicated that the errors made were inversely related to the frequency of the sounds in the repertoires of infants, and to the frequency of the sounds in the English language. Results also indicated that the stability of specific errors increased with age while the total frequency of errors decreased. The analysis of specific errors indicated that more errors were associated with the place of articulation than with either the manner of articulation or the voiced-voiceless dimension.