A referenciação na produção de narrativas orais no envelhecimento sadio e na Doença de Alzheimer e sua relação com a escolaridade e o tipo de estímulo

Abstract

The present study investigates referential processes in oral narratives among healthy elderly people of different educational backgrounds, and also in Alzheimer’s Disease (DA), considering the influence of the type of task. This was accomplished by analyzing the use of references in two distinct narratives modality – news free report (RN) and narratives using a visual support of a sequence of images (NF) – produced by healthy elderly people, being 20 with high education and 19 with lower education, and four diagnosed with DA in mild to moderate level. The study of referencing is based on the concepts of Linguistics Textual, proposed by Koch (2013, 2012, 2011, 2009, 2005) and Marcuschi (2014, 2008, 2005), and analysis methodology was adapted from the proposed Roncarati (2010). After transcribing the narratives produced by the participants, analyzed the number and type of references present in texts (a quantitative analysis) as well as the appropriateness of those references (a qualitative analysis). Data were intra and inter crossed. The results found show that the RN type is more likely to be a more concise, with lesser theme and referential progression text than the NF type. The NF type, in turn, allows a greater use of demonstrative deictics. Concerning education, elderly people with a higher formal education presented coherent narratives with no referential problems, showing a well-preserved discursive ability. Healthy elderly people with lower education, although they showed well-preserved abilities, demonstrated inferior performance compared to the ones with higher education regarding the use of nominal expressions that are ambiguous or that have no referent, expressions with vague meaning and spatial deictics (in the RN types) and texts with lesser referential and theme progression, besides a greater use of words with vague meaning (in the NF types). Finally, the participants with DA presented an inferior performance compared to healthy elderly people in both types of narratives: in the RN ones, they struggled to report a recent fact and organize it in a narrative context and in the NF ones they were more likely to produce isolated descriptions of the scenes, showing their lack of ability in recognizing the narrative structure presented in the images. Moreover, the ability to properly use spatial deictic seems to be impaired in the disease. Only one participant with DA, presented a similar performance to the control group to the lower education in NF type. The findings of this study, therefore, show the important role of formal education in the preservation of discursive abilities for healthy aging, as well as presented evidences about the characteristics of referential processes in DA.