EC Neurology

During the aging process, cognitive changes occur, including changes in a person's speech and language skills. These changes can affect the daily communication and quality of life of the elderly, with and without dementia. The aim of this research was to examine the expressive linguistic abilities of elderly with and without dementia. The sample consisted of 40 subjects with dementia and 30 subjects without dementia, older than 60. The subjects' linguistic expression abilities were assessed on the tasks of the Linguistic Expression subtest from the Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia (ABCD). The study results showed that the elderly without dementia manifest subtle changes in the linguistic expression domain. Their results were significantly different from the results of subjects with dementia on all four test tasks of linguistic expression: object description, generative naming, confrontational naming, and conceptual definition.

In conclusion, language tasks are an important part of the cognitive assessment of the elderly, especially people with dementia. Knowing the decline of abilities in certain cognitive domains in the elderly allows for the targeted creation of intervention strategies to improve the communication abilities of the elderly with and without dementia.

 Keywords: Linguistic Expression; Dementia; Elderly

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