The use of figurative language in the discourse of people with dementia with Alzheimer

Abstract

Most of the work conducted on figurative language in the discourse of people with dementia has been focused on their comprehension ability (Brundage & Bookshire, 1995; Chapman, Ulatowska, Franklin, Shobe, Thompson & McIntire, 1997; Papagno, 2001; Amanzio, Geminiani, Leotta & Cappa, 2008). However, there are not many studies analyzing how people suffering from this syndrome introduce this type of constructions. Bearing this in mind, this work presents the following aims: (i) to identify the different types of figurative language people with dementia use; (ii) to verify whether the frequency of use of figurative language decreases as the cognitive decline progresses; (iii) to detect how the use of figurative language can work as a compensatory strategy to hide the deficits caused by dementia. In order to do so, a corpus with videos from 23 people suffering from different forms of dementia and in different stages of the disease was compiled. The types of figurative language they introduce as well as their frequency of use have been analyzed. The results show that, even if there is a decline in their frequency of use, people with dementia still utilize figurative language until the final stage of the disease. Moreover, they resort to both discursive extenders and rhetoric language as a compensatory strategy, particularly during the moderate stage.