the comparison of morpho-syntactic patterns device comprehension in speech of alzheimer and normal elderly people

Background: alzheimer’s disease can give rise to aphasia and difficulties with word finding, naming, and word comprehension. also it can affect the comprehension of morpho-syntactic patterns device as one of cohesive devices. objectives: the purpose of this research is to investigate and compare the comprehension of sub-devices of morpho-syntactic patterns in the speech of persian-speaking elderly people with alzheimer’s disease and the normal elderly based on dooley and levinson’s perspective. sub-devices of morpho-syntactic patterns include consistency of inflectional categories, echoic utterances and discourse-pragmatic structuring. methods: this descriptive-analytic and cross-sectional research conducted on the speech of 12 elderly people comprising 6 alzheimer and 6 normal individuals 74 to 90 years old who were selected using available sampling method. the data was analyzed by spss software and t-test. results: the findings indicate, except for the consistency of inflectional categories (p = 0.017), in other two subsets including echoic utterances (p = 0.411) and discourse-pragmatic structuring (p = 0.245). however, in overall analysis of this device (p = 0.026). conclusions: this study supports the conclusion that there is a significant difference between the comprehension of morphosyntactic patterns device as a whole in the speech of persian speaking alzheimer’s and normal elderly people.