Notes On the Discourse Features of Persian-speaking Parkinsonian Patients

Abstract

Idiopathic Parkinson is an age-related, common progressive neurodegenerative disease whose cause is yet unknown. This disease leaves several impacts on the speech of its patients, many of which have not undergone a serious study in Persian. The ultimate goal of this article is provision of the discourse features of Persian-speaking Parkinsonian patients, using 3 major tasks to evaluate the local coherence in their speech. The tasks include "spontaneous speech", "Cookie theft task" and "story description task", with the hypothesis that the Parkinsonian patients have deficits in producing local coherence and in using the cohesive devices. In doing this research, the above-mentioned tasks were administered to 5 non-demented patients with idiopathic Parkinson and 5 healthy people, as the control group and the results were analysed. I concluded that during their early-moderate stage, the PD patients were not significantly impaired in topic shifts, comparing to the healthy ones, whereas the patients in late-moderate and advanced stages seemed to have a meaningful deficiency in this case.