Thesis
Narrative comprehension in Alzheimer's disease: assessing infernces [sic] and memory operations with a think-aloud procedure
Washington State University
Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
2008
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/101150
Abstract
To gain a better understanding of text comprehension abilities in Alzheimer's disease (AD), a think-aloud protocol was used to examine the role of inferencing and the memory operations used to produce inferences. Twenty participants with AD and 20 cognitively healthy older adults (OA) read narrative stories, one sentence at a time, pausing to talk aloud after each sentence. A verbal protocol analysis developed by Trabasso and Magliano (1996), was used to code the participants utterances into inferential and non-inferential clauses. We found that compared with OA controls, the AD participant's showed poorer story comprehension, produced fewer inferences, where less skilled at providing both explanations of story events and using prior text information to both explain and predict outcomes. In addition, the AD group relied more on the activation of world knowledge which led to less effective inferences. Furthermore, the AD participants produced more non-inferential statements particularly more that were incoherent. The findings suggest that the AD group's memory difficulties are interfering with their ability to create a global coherence to support text comprehension.
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Details
- Title
- Narrative comprehension in Alzheimer's disease
- Creators
- Scott Creamer
- Contributors
- Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe (Degree Supervisor)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Psychology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University; Pullman, Wash. :
- Identifiers
- 99900525142201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis