COMPROMISSIONI SEMANTICO-LESSICALI NEI PAZIENTI ITALOFONI AFFETTI DA DEMENZA: UN’ANALISI CORPUS-BASED

Autori

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54103/2037-3597/21986

Abstract

Lo studio si pone l’obiettivo di indagare la compromissione semantico-lessicale indotta dall’insorgenza di malattie dementigene per la lingua italiana. A tale scopo è stato reclutato un campione di 40 soggetti anziani lucani, divisi in due gruppi bilanciati per sesso ed età: 20 soggetti cognitivamente integri e 20 soggetti con diagnosi conclamata di demenza (morbo di Alzheimer, demenza mista, demenza frontotemporale, demenza vascolare o demenza non specificata), assistiti nella RSA Universo Salute - Opera Don Uva (PZ). Mediante la somministrazione di tre task linguistici, è stato acquisito un corpus di circa 9 ore di sonoro: completata l’annotazione a livello ortografico, fonetico-acustico, morfosintattico, semantico-lessicale e sintattico, sono stati estratti 151 indici linguistici, poi comparati tra le due coorti in ottica quantitativa/qualitativa al fine di evidenziare tratti linguistici che significativamente distinguono l’eloquio di soggetti affetti da una forma di declino cognitivo. In questa sede proponiamo i risultati dell’analisi semantico-lessicale condotta sui testi orali raccolti: la valutazione delle molteplici feature estratte, arricchita da riflessioni di tipo qualitativo, consente di caratterizzare con maggiore precisione i deficit semantico-lessicali riconducibili all’insorgenza di una patologia dementigena.  

 

Lexical-semantic impairments in Italian-speaking patients with dementia: a corpus-based analysis

This study aims at characterizing the linguistic-communicative profile of dementia diseases in the Italian language. To this purpose, we recruited a sample of 40 elderly subjects from Basilicata, divided into two groups balanced by sex and age: 20 cognitively intact subjects and 20 patients with a diagnosis of dementia (i.e., Alzheimer's disease, mixed dementia, frontotemporal dementia, vascular dementia, or unspecified dementia) resident in the nursing home RSA Universo Salute - Opera Don Uva (PZ). We acquired a corpus of about 9 hours of semi-spontaneous speech exploiting three linguistic tasks. After annotating the spoken texts at the orthographic, phonetic-acoustic, morphosyntactic, and semantic levels, we extracted 151 linguistic indexes (i.e., the so-called “Digital Linguistic Biomarkers” DLBs). Then we quantitatively/qualitatively compared them between the cohorts to highlight linguistic markers that significantly distinguish the speech of each group. Here we present the findings of the lexical-semantic analysis conducted on the oral texts. The high number of statistically relevant features related to this linguistic level enables us to depict more precisely the degradation of linguistic skills induced by the disease

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2023-12-15

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LINGUISTICA E STORIA DELLA LINGUA IITALIANA