چکیده:
Objectives: This paper aims to explore whether the Persian-speaking patients of different
stages, ranging from mild to moderate, have a deficit in semantic processing by comparing the
performance of Alzheimer’s patients with that of the healthy individuals.
Methods: The subjects of both the groups of Alzheimer’s patients and healthy control were
matched for age, the state of monolingual or bilingual, and socio-cultural status. In order to
assess the semantic processing ability of the subjects, Pekkala’s 2004 model was adopted.
According to the model, the subjects were required to produce (say) the name of as many as
category members of animals as possible within the time limit of 60 seconds.
Results: The findings showed that while healthy subjects had an intact semantic processing
ability, the AD patients showed weak performance in the five measures of semantic fluency
including the number of true linguistic units, the total quantity of words, word size in clusters,
the mean cluster size, and the cluster switching.
Discussion: Conclusion: Following the framework of Troyer (1998b), it has been concluded
that AD patients suffer from the semantic processing.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Results: The findings showed that while healthy subjects had an intact semantic processing ability, the AD patients showed weak performance in the five measures of semantic fluency including the number of true linguistic units, the total quantity of words, word size in clusters, the mean cluster size, and the cluster switching.
As per the table, the t-test results showed that the performance of the two groups of Alzheimer’s patients and healthy control, based on parameters like true linguistic units, total quantity of words, the linguistic unit clusters, the mean cluster size and the number of switches, were significantly different (|t|˃2.
However, the task performance of both the groups in fluency, including the proportion of words in cluster and number of errors, did not significantly dif- fer (|t|˂2.
The results of this research are in accordance with those of Hodges and Patterson [6], who found that the seman- tic memory of Alzheimer’s patients compared to those of the healthy control group is impaired.
Furthermore, the finding of the semantic fluency task conducted in this research is partly tantamount to that of Pekkala (2004), in which the performance of the Alzheimer’s patients and healthy control subjects did not differ significantly with respect to the variable of the proportion of words in clusters.
A significant difference was found in the perfor- mance of Alzheimer’s patients and the healthy people with regard to the measures of semantic fluency including the cluster size, the overall quantity of correct linguistic 214 units, the quantity of words in cluster, switch in semantic clusters, and thorough errors highlighted.