ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of working memory intervention on language production by people with mild or moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A total of 39 AD patients, 21 with mild AD and 18 with moderate AD and 18 normal controls were given 18 sessions of working memory intervention. After these sessions, the transfer effects and maintenance effects at the 3-month follow-up were assessed. A word-span task and a digit-span task were used to evaluate working memory. Language-production abilities were compared through four tasks: a verbal fluency, a confrontation naming, a word definition, and a picture-description task. Task performances of working memory and language production were the lowest in the baseline stage and the highest in the transfer-effect stage. The three groups had transfer effects in all tasks, while the maintenance effects were limited by groups and tasks. This study proves that working memory intervention for AD patients is effective for language production. In addition, we have paved the way for working memory intervention to improve language production by AD patients in clinical settings by presenting the transfer and maintenance effect for each task of language production.

摘要

本研究的目的是调查工作记忆干预对轻度或中度阿尔茨海默病 (AD) 患者语言生成的影响。共有 39 名 AD 患者，其中 21 名轻度 AD 和 18 名中度 AD 和 18 名正常对照者接受了 18 次工作记忆干预。在这些会议之后，评估了 3 个月随访时的转移效果和维持效果。使用单词跨度任务和数字跨度任务来评估工作记忆。语言生产能力通过四个任务进行比较：语言流畅性、对抗命名、单词定义和图片描述任务。工作记忆和语言生产的任务表现在基线阶段最低，在转移效应阶段最高。三组在所有任务中都有转移效应，而维护效果受组和任务的限制。本研究证明，AD患者的工作记忆干预对语言生成有效。此外，我们通过呈现语言产生的每个任务的转移和维持效应，为工作记忆干预铺平了道路，以改善临床环境中 AD 患者的语言产生。