Aphasia and Dementia: Lexical Acess Complications among Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

The following article discusses how Alzheimer’s Disease can affect the linguistic capabilities of those living with the illness and the effects related to lexical access.  Firstly, through the use of the hypothetico-deductive model (Kocke, 2011) and with bibliographic research this work conducts a brief historical account of the linguistic studies done with patients suffering from Alzheimer’s. Next, a comparison between two theories is made, one belonging to the Neuroscience of Language, Localizationism, and the second comes from Psychology, mainly the relationship connecting Thought and Language described by Vygotsky (1991, 2000). Furthermore, the main objective is to indicate how the access to the word classes is altered during the development of the pathology. After the completion of this research, it’s evident that AD, which is relatively new and discovered at the beginning of the previous century, doesn’t have its causes identified. However, it’s observable that the symptoms are strictly connected to linguistic déficit − such as anomia − which, in addition to not being seen as relevant for the studies related to the disease, despite being part of the investigation since the beginning, many times those cases are analyzed in a manner that alienates them from the pathology, using the Localization Theory, without studying the intrinsic relationships between Language and the cognitive processes. Moreover, with the help of studies by Alegria (2013), it’s possible to identify symbolic differences between the processes of distinct word classes.