Comparing linguistic features of Turkish patients with lewy body and alzheimer dementia

Dementia is a syndrome of the decrease on cognitive and intellectual functions, which causes loss of cognitive functions such as memory, language and speech, perception, calculation, judgement, abstraction, solving problems. Linguistic problems are intensely seen in the most common dementia type, Alzheimer. The second common type of dementia, Lewy Body dementia, has similar clinical features with Alzheimer dementia so these two types are often confused. The purpose of this study is to reveal similarities and differences between Lewy Body and Alzheimer dementia by comparing linguistic features of them. 20 Alzheimer and 20 Lewy Body dementia patients diagnosed in Dokuz Eylul University, Faculty of Medicine and 20 healthy people consist of the database of this study. Firstly, Ege Aphasia Test was applied to assess the general linguistic skills. Then, series of picture was shown to the groups and they were told to make a story about it for pragmatic evaluation. Their speech was assessed by Maxims of Quantity and Relation of Grice?s Cooperative Principle. The data was interpreted by statistical analyses. According to result of General Linguistic Evaluation, it was determined that both Alzheimer and Lewy Body dementia patients have no problem in spontaneous speech but both patient groups have problem in perception, repetition, naming, reading and writing. It was revealed that both Alzheimer and Lewy Body patients give either too much or less information in their speech according to result of Pragmatic Evaluation. Additionally, it was observed that while Lewy Body patients give made-up information about pictures because of their visual hallucination, Alzheimer dementia patients give irrelevant, unnecessary information.Key Words: Alzheimer Dementia, Lewy Body Dementia, Cooperative Principle, Maxims of Quantity and Relation