Language Impairment in English-Speaking Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease: A Role and Reference Grammar Contribution

The linguistic aspects of Alzheimer’s disease have received much less attention from qualitative viewpoints than from quantitative research perspectives. For this reason, the present article proposes the application of the linking algorithm provided by Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) to a corpus from English-speaking patients with Alzheimer’s, namely the Pitt corpus. A sample of verb predicates from this corpus has been analyzed according to the steps provided by the grammar. Thus, the aims of this article are, on the one hand, to identify and describe the linguistic deficits found in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease and, on the other, to show the feasibility of this grammar in the description and possible early diagnosis of this neuro-degenerative disease. The results manifest a greater proportion of simple sentences with respect to coordinate, cosubordinate and subordinate sentences, as well as compensation strategies and problems with lexical retrieval.