Coherence Patterns in Alzheimer's Discourse

Abstract

This article reports on linguistic features and patterns of coherence in two levels (mild and advanced) of discourse produced by Alzheimer's patients. It argues and demonstrates that as the disease progresses, the discourse of Alzheimer's patients becomes pregrammatical in that it is vocabulary driven and reliant on meaning-based features of discourse rather than grammatically based features. Theories of pregrammatical and grammatical modes of processing and comprehension are discussed and used as an explanatory framework for understanding 4 fundamental coherence requirements. These are grounding, temporal coherence, spatial coherence, and thematic coherence. Data collected from Alzheimer's patients are used to illustrate how these types of coherence vary from earlier to later stages of the disease.