Linguistic properties of senile dementia: a case study of the speech of a 73 year old gikuyu female subject

Abstract

Senile dementia is a brain condition associated with old age. Bromley (1974) describes it as intellectual deterioration that leads to speech becoming incomprehensible, inappropriate. and finally a meaningless babble. This investigation sought to analyze the linguistic properties of senile dementia. The study was undertaken as a single case study of a 73 year old female diagnosed with senile dementia since 2006. It concentrated on Gikuyu, the dominant language used by the subject. It sought to answer the question how the phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic features of the subject's speech were impaired in relation to the overall discourse delivery. Whereas many studies have been done on dementia, they have a psychological, medical and sociological approach. Language wise, studies have concentrated on naming tests to review recall and the effect of this condition on foreign languages. However, this investigation focused' on senile dementia in Gikuyu, a Bantu agglutinative language, where no previous study involvi~g the linguistic properties has been done. It was worthwhile to investigate how language loss is manifested in its system. Data was collected through discrete tape recording of subject's speech, oral unstructured interviews of the carers/family, as well as written records by the carers and researcher on subject's speech errors. Secondary data was collected through library research to get information on language loss, senile dementia and linguistic categories. The theoretical framework adopted an eclectic approach. It mainly used psycho linguistic theories on speech production and comprehension but borrowed approaches from phonology, morphology, semantics and pragmatics in order to analyze and explain language impairments generated in the research. The eclectic approach was appropriate since the study was an exploration in the areas of cognition, human ageing and language impairment vis-a-vis, normal language, which is a complex interplay of various variables. The results indicated that senile dementia impairs linguistic capability of an individual in varying degrees. The results of this study will be helpful in adding a knowledge base to existing literature and for future researchers in this area.