Methodological Obstacles in Research on Alzheimer‘s Language Disorders : Between Silence and Terminology
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This presentation explores two methodological challenges encountered in an ongoing doctoral research project focused on linguistic manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease. The study compares speech-related symptoms and their terminology in Czech and French-speaking contexts through a combination of participatory observation and semi-structured interviews with medical professionals. The first set of difficulties arose during fieldwork in a Czech care home specializing in patients with dementia. While the initial hypothesis targeted specific linguistic phenomena - such as lexical diversity, syntactic errors, or morphological anomalies - it became evident that patient speech production is highly variable and often minimal, especially in advanced stages of the disease. Contrary to expectations, many sessions resulted in very limited or no analyzable speech, prompting a shift of focus toward patients in earlier stages of the disease and highlighting the relevance of non-verbal communication in clinical-linguistic observation. These field insights underscore the limitations of pre-defined linguistic categories when confronted with the lived reality of neurodegenerative illness. The second area of methodological friction emerged in the process of mapping how neurologists and healthcare workers label atypical verbal behaviors. A terminological questionnaire was distributed among Czech neurologists, neuropsychologists, and caregivers, revealing substantial variation in how terms such as paraphasia, neologism, mutism, or pause are understood and applied. These inconsistencies raise important questions about the applicability of standardized linguistic terminology in clinical practice and about the degree to which such terminology is shared across disciplines and languages. While the French data collection is currently underway, the Czech findings already offer valuable insight into the complexity of researching Alzheimer’s language disorders in real-world settings. This presentation thus reflects on the tensions between methodological planning and empirical unpredictability, proposing a more flexible, context-sensitive approach to data collection in clinical linguistics. |
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