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Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis logoLink to Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
. 1993 Spring;26(1):77–87. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1993.26-77

Effects of memory aids on the dyadic conversations of individuals with dementia.

M S Bourgeois 1
PMCID: PMC1297721  PMID: 8473260

Abstract

The effects of a prosthetic memory aid on the conversational content and social skills of dyads with dementia were evaluated. Six individuals with moderate to severe dementia served as either subject or partner in dyads during 5-min conversational probes conducted three times per week in day-care and nursing-home settings. During phases when a memory aid, consisting of personally relevant picture and sentence stimuli, was available, most subjects used their own aid to improve the quality of conversations by increasing the frequency of on-topic statements, diminishing nonproductive utterances, lengthening their conversational turn, and/or increasing the frequency of turns taken. Most partners demonstrated awareness of social discourse conventions by appropriately relinquishing conversational dominance, decreasing both content and nonproductive utterances, and increasing acknowledging or affirmative comments when subjects used memory aids. Naive judges' ratings of aided and unaided conversational samples on seven conversational dimensions reflected differences in perceptions of significant improvement as a function of the conversational discourse style of each dyad.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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