Acknowledgments viiIntroduction ixChapter 1. Linguistics, Language Pathologies and Alzheimer's Disease: A Brief History 11.1. Gagnepain's theory of mediation: an approach to pathological speech on its own terms 21.2. "Looking for help from linguistics": other (rare) resources 10Chapter 2. Alzheimer's Disease: General Symptoms and Language Impairments 172.1. General symptoms 182.2. Language-related problems 25Chapter 3. Cognitive Testing: The Key to Diagnosing Memory Pathologies 313.1. Definitions of psychometric tests 313.2. Test types 343.3. Intelligence tests: a starting point 353.4. The mysterious test 383.5. Postulates on verbal language in cognitive testing 393.6. Verbal and non-verbal cognitive tests 433.6.1. Non-verbal tests 443.6.2. Basic verbal tests: naming, designation and matching 483.6.3. Tests using idiomatic expressions 543.6.4. Barbizet's test: "The Lion's Tale" 583.7. Tests and context(s) 663.8. Absence of a cultural dimension in cognitive testing 703.8.1. First-generation North African patients in France 703.8.2. Erasure of Czech/Slovak cultural disparities 713.8.3. Connecting cognition and culture: origins and perspectives 723.9. Summary: rewriting tests 73Chapter 4. Analyzing the Speech of Alzheimer's Patients: Methods and Perspectives 794.1. An eclectic range of approaches 794.2. Patient-physician dialog and autobiographies: microsemantic analysis 894.3. Analyzing patient discourse: perspectives 1064.3.1. Recursion, circularity and sequences: finding meaning through analysis grids 1064.3.2. A multi-channel approach 1134.3.3. Confabulations: "from minor distortion to bizarre tales"17 117Conclusion 129Appendices 135Appendix 1. Interview Transcriptions: The Lion's Tale Test 137Appendix 2. English Translations for Chapter 4 159References 165Index 173
Christophe Cusimano is Professor of French linguistics and a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle. He teaches and conducts his research in semantics at the Institute of Romanticism of the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.