Supervisors info:
Σπυριδούλα Βαρλοκώστα, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ
Βασίλειος Σπυρόπουλος, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ
Γιώργος Μαρκόπουλος, Αναπληρωτής Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Φιλολογίας, ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
The present study examines the production of pauses in Alzheimer's patients and healthy adults through a picture description task. 7 Greek patients with a diagnosis of mild to medium Alzheimer’s disease (mean age; 73,71 years) and 7 Greek healthy adults matched for their age (mean age; 72,14 years) and years of education participated in the study. The picture description task comprised of the updated version of the Cookie Theft Picture (CTP, Berube et al., 2018). Total pauses (long, short and pauses before Nouns) produced by the AD patients were not found significantly longer those produced by healthy adults (t(12)= 0.524, p= 0.483), contrary to what recent studies propose (Pistono et al., 2016 ∙ Sluis et al., 2010 ∙ Yi-Hsiu L., 2017). However, increase in pausing frequency of AD patients was found statistically significant, as regards to overall pause frequency (t(12) = 8,506, p = 0.00), long pauses frequency (> 1 sec) (t(12) = 5,586, p= 0,00) and pause- before-Noun frequency (t(12)= 3,299, p= 0,006). The results of our study is in accordance with studies examining the ratio of pauses to total speech time in AD patients (Gayraud, Lee & Barkat-Defradas, 2010 ∙ Meilan et al., 2012 ∙ König et al., 2015). In conclusion, our results indicate that Greek AD patients do not produce longer rather than more frequent pauses in their speech compared to healthy adults.
Keywords:
pauses, Greek, Alzheimer's Disease, Cookie Theft Picture, long pauses, pause frequency, pause-before-Noun
