Table 2.
Language functions in mild cognitive impairment and in the different stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
| Language characteristic changes | MCI | Mild AD | Moderate AD | Severe AD | Reference | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phonetics-phonology | ||||||
| Temporal changes in spontaneous speech (increasing hesitation number and time) | + | + | ++ | +++ | Forbes and Venneri (2005); Hoffmann et al. (2010); Roark et al. (2011); Meilán et al. (2012); Satt et al. (2014); Jarrold et al. (2014); Laske et al. (2015) | |
| Phonemic paraphasia | + | + | ++ | +++ | Croot et al. (2000); Forbes et al. (2002); Hoffmann et al. (2010); Wutzler et al. (2013); Roark et al. (2011); Satt et al. (2014); Jarrold et al. (2014) | |
| Lexical-semantics | ||||||
| Word-finding and word retrieval difficulties | + | + | ++ | +++ | Smith et al. (1989); Bayles (1993); Light (1993); Kempler and Zelinski (1994); Kempler et al. (2001); Garrard et al. (2005); Taler and Phillips (2008); Dos Santos et al. (2011); Cardoso et al. (2014); Fraser et al. (2014); Laske et al. (2015); Garrard et al. (2014) | |
| Verbal fluency difficulties | Phonemic (letter) | + | + | ++ | +++ | Barth et al. (2005); Juncos-Rabadán et al. (2010); Hoffmann et al. (2010); Dos Santos et al. (2011); Roark et al. (2011); Satt et al. (2014); Jarrold et al. (2014) |
| Semantic | + | + | ++ | +++ | ||
| Semantic paraphasia | ? | + | ++ | +++ | Juncos-Rabadán et al. (2010); Hoffmann et al. (2010); Roark et al. (2011); Satt et al. (2014); Jarrold et al. (2014) | |
| SYNTAX | ||||||
| Reduced syntactic complexity | − | − | + | +++ | Caramelli et al. (1998); Small et al. (1997); Kempler (1995); Bickel et al. (2000); Ullman (2001); Juncos-Rabadán et al. (2010) | |
| Agrammatisms | − | − | − | +++ | Small et al. (1997); Kempler (1995); Ullman (2001) | |
| DISCOURSE-PRAGMATICS | ||||||
| Reduction in productive and receptive discourse-level processing | −/+ | + | ++ | +++ | Hodges et al. (1992); Ripich (1994); Taler and Phillips (2008); Weiner et al. (2008); Hoffmann et al. (2010); Juncos-Rabadán et al. (2010); Rapp and Wild (2011); Tsantali et al. (2013); Cardoso et al. (2014) | |