Contrastive conversational analysis of language production by Alzheimer's and control people

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by memory disorders, although it affects also other cognitive functions (executive functions, attention, gnosia, praxia and language) and the communication ability. Our objective is to study verbal communication of people affected by the Alzheimer's disease at early to moderate stages. One particularity of our approach is that we are working in ecological conversational situations: people are interviewed by persons they know and in non-artificial environment. We propose a contrastive study of verbal productions of five people affected by the Alzheimer's disease and of five control people, both over 80 years old. To obtain quantitative and qualitative results, the oral corpora are transcribed and processed with the NLP methods and tools, and manually. Our results indicate that the Alzheimer's patients present lexical and semantic deficit and that their conversation is reduced comparing to the control people.