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Eon'eo cheong'gag jang'ae yeon'gu/Communication sciences & disorders
By Ju-Hee Nam and Sangeun Shin.
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This study examined changes in pause production characteristics according to disease severity by analyzing between-utterance and within-utterance pauses produced by patients with Dementia of the Alzheimer’s Type (DAT) during a Story Retelling Task (SRT).
Fifty-six participants, including 21 healthy elderly individuals, 16 patients with mild DAT, and 19 patients with moderate to severe DAT, completed the SRT, in which they listened to a familiar traditional fairy tale and retold it. Only task-relevant utterances were analyzed. Using Praat, pause frequency, pause ratio, and mean pause duration were measured separately for between- and within-utterance pauses, and group differences were statistically analyzed.
For between-utterance pauses, pause frequency did not differ significantly among groups, but the moderate to severe DAT group showed a significantly higher pause ratio and a longer mean pause duration than the healthy elderly group. For within-utterance pauses, pause ratio and mean duration did not differ significantly among groups, but the moderate to severe DAT group showed significantly lower pause frequency than both the healthy elderly and mild DAT groups.
As DAT severity increases, between-utterance pauses become longer and more frequent relative to total speech time, reflecting greater difficulty in macro-planning and memory retrieval for discourse organization, whereas within-utterance pauses decrease, reflecting fewer attempts at lexical retrieval alongside utterance simplification. These findings suggest that betweenand within-utterance pauses may serve as differentiated markers of communicative decline, informing severity-specific approaches to assessment and intervention in DAT.
Published in Eon'eo cheong'gag jang'ae yeon'gu/Communication sciences & disorders. The abstract is shown as published and remains the work of its authors; read the full article at the source.
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