The Significance of Semantic Hierarchy and Canonicity in Sentence Comprehension: A Study of Persian-speaking Patients With Alzheimer

Abstract

Introduction: A lot of research in diverse languages has tried to scrutinize the impact of canonicity upon the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease. Regarding the gap in the Persian setting, this study tried to delve into the nature of this deficit in patients with Alzheimer.

Materials and Methods: This is a case series study, and our subjects included 2 Persian- speaking monolingual patients with Alzheimer and 5 healthy elderly individuals matched with each other according to parameters like educational degree, vernacular tongue, and homeland. The categories to be tested included subject agentive, subject experiencer, object experiencer, and object cleft constructions.

Results: The results of the sentence completion task demonstrated that problems would emerge when patients with Alzheimer try to comprehend the syntactic structures belonged to 2, 3, and 4 categories.

Conclusion: Our findings would demonstrate that patients with Alzheimer have many challenges when trying to map syntactic representation  onto semantic realization. This type of deficit escalates when patients attempt to assign thematic roles to psychological predicates. As for the clinical implication of the research, it was recommended that the type of structures utilized by neuropsychiatrists for the communicative purpose be chosen from utterances that are in line with the mapping strategy.