2017 Volume 37 Issue 2 Pages 205-211
The metaphor comprehension task was administered in 20 probable Alzheimerʼs disease patients with mild to moderate dementia (AD group) . We selected 30 low-familiarity simile sentences. For each sentence, the subjects were asked to choose one written statement that best represented its meaning from four choices (Fujimoto et al. 2016) . The scores of the task and of the Token Test (TT) were compared with those of 20 healthy elderly (elderly group) or 15 aphasic patients (aphasic group) . In addition, correlations between the scores of the task and those of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) or the Frontal Assessment Battery (FAB) were analyzed for the AD group. On the metaphor comprehension task, the AD group exhibited significantly lower scores than the control group, but the difference between the AD and the aphasic group was not significant. On the TT, the AD group exhibited significantly lower scores than the control group, but it exhibited significantly higher scores than the aphasic group.
The scores of the metaphor comprehension task in the AD group significantly correlated with the total scores of the MMSE. The scores of “attention and calculation” domain and “writing” on the MMSE and “affinity” and “word fluency” on the FAB significantly correlated with the scores of the metaphor comprehension task. The nature of disorders of metaphor comprehension in Alzheimerʼs disease may differ from those of aphasia, and deficits of executive function and semantic memory may affect such disorders.
