Abstract
Our research was inspired by the study of Bánréti et al. (2016), it has so far focused on one part of it, namely the use of recursive sentences. In their study, Broca's aphasia patients were found not to use recursive sentences, they preffer to project into specific characters, but nonetheless communicating relevant ToM content.
Thus, this is a very significant finding and an identifier that can be used to distinguish Alzheimer's disease from aphasia. We set ourselves several objectives: (1) to describe the agrammatic phenomena that are part of the patient's speech; (2) to present the patient's difficulties in realizing selected communication skills; (3) to confront the analyzed data with theoretical findings.
We did linguistic analysis of the patient's spoken dialogue; the material analysed is pre-existing transcripts, which were taken for the purpose of previous research and on which constructions appearing as recursive sentences were evaluated in pairs. The research was conducted on 6 patients diagnosed with aphasia.
Our results agree with the study of Bánréti et al. In patients with Broca's aphasia there is no use of recursive sentences in patients with Wernicke's aphasia the frequency of recursive sentences use is slightly higher, clearly highest in patients with transcortical motor aphasia.
Communicating relevant ToM content is predicted to be more likely only in patients with Broca's aphasia, as they project into one of the characters when describing the plot of an animated series in a situation where they are describing the interaction of two characters. In particular, we find a benefit for speech therapy practice in a better analysis of the deficiencies in patients just on the basis of linguistic analyses.
The information obtained could be passed on to physicians and speech therapists, who could continue to use it to determine the most effective type of therapy for a particular patient.