Language Performance and Impairment of Iraqi Patients with Alzheimer's

As the title of the thesis indicates, this study intends to investigate language performance and impairment elicited in the speech sample of some Iraqi patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The problem of this study is to see whether Alzheimer’s disease affects its patients’ language, and if so, what areas of language it affects. The aim of this study is to inspect and to explain both language performance and impairment of Alzheimer’s patients during the disease. It hypothesizes that Alzheimer’s patients suffer from sound substitution and omission on the phonological level. On the semantic level, the patients’ language is affected on both the denotative and connotative sides.On the pragmatic level, the study hypothesizes that the patients break the rules of turn taking when they engage in conversations, and finally the study hypothesizes that Alzheimer’s patients then suffer from language impairment in these areas. This study focuses to capture the most common language deficits that are noted in the speech sample of the patients by using an eclectic model which focuses on the areas that are said to have some deficits with, which are: phonology, semantics, and pragmatics.