Assessing natural metalinguistic skills in people with Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia

Vicent Rosell-Clari; Carlos Hernández-Sacristán; Teresa Cervera-Crespo; Àgata Lorenzo-Cordero

doi:10.1016/j.jcomdis.2020.106058

Assessing natural metalinguistic skills in people with Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia

J Commun Disord. 2021 Jan-Feb:89:106058. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2020.106058. Epub 2020 Nov 27.

Authors

Vicent Rosell-Clari¹, Carlos Hernández-Sacristán², Teresa Cervera-Crespo³, Àgata Lorenzo-Cordero⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Basic Psychology, University of Valencia, 21 Blasco Ibanez Avenue, 46010, Valencia, Spain. Electronic address: Vicente.Rosell@uv.es.
² Department of Linguistics and Communication Sciences, University of Valencia, 32 Blasco Ibanez Avenue, 46010, Valencia, Spain. Electronic address: Carlos.Hernandez-Sacristan@uv.es.
³ Department of Basic Psychology, University of Valencia, 21 Blasco Ibanez Avenue, 46010, Valencia, Spain. Electronic address: Teresa.Cervera@uv.es.
⁴ Department of Basic Psychology, University of Valencia, 21 Blasco Ibanez Avenue, 46010, Valencia, Spain. Electronic address: Agata.Lorenzo@uv.es.

PMID: 33316623
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2020.106058

Abstract

Objective: The aim of this paper is to assess whether the use of natural metalinguistic skills can be used to differentiate linguistic-communicative profiles of people with dementia (Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia in the behavioural and primary progressive aphasia variants) in the earliest stages of the disease.

Method: A sample of 180 people was selected. Sixty had Alzheimer's disease, 20 had frontotemporal dementia of the behavioural variant, and 40 had frontotemporal dementia of the primary progressive aphasia variant (20 had non-fluent primary progressive aphasia and 20 had semantic dementia). The control group was composed of 60 healthy people with ages, gender, and professions as similar as possible to those of the people in the dementia groups. All the participants were administered the Spanish adaptation of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Global Deterioration Scale (GDS) to assess dementia severity. To assess the use of natural metalinguistic skills, a 40-item test (MetAphAs), specifically designed for this aim, was administered.

Results: The test showed high internal validity and high positive correlations with the MMSE. Statistically significant differences were observed in the total scores on this test and in the scores on each of its sections, when comparing the whole group and the subgroups of people with dementia with the control group. Additionally, the scores on most of the sections of the MetAphAs test presented statistically significant differences when the different subgroups of people with dementia were compared.

Conclusions: A test like the MetAphAs, specifically designed to assess natural metalinguistic abilities, may be useful for obtaining differential communicative-linguistic profiles according to the type of dementia in the early stages of the disease. However, additional research is needed to obtain more conclusive results.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; Executive function; Frontotemporal dementia; Linguistic-communicative profile; Primary progressive aphasia; Semantic dementia.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Alzheimer Disease*
Aphasia, Primary Progressive*
Frontotemporal Dementia*
Humans
Linguistics*
Neuropsychological Tests