Ep 12 How to Manage the Effects of Dementia On Speech :: Dr. Roger Kreuz

Roger Kreuz is a professor of psychology, an associate dean, and director of graduate studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis. He earned his graduate degrees in experimental psychology at Princeton University.

Dr. Kreuz - @rjkmemphis on twitter - conducts research on discourse, pragmatics, and nonliteral language. He is the coauthor (with Richard Roberts) of three books about language and communication, all of which are intended for a general audience. The first of these, Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language, was published in 2015. A second, Getting Through: The Pleasures and Perils of Cross-Cultural Communication, was published in 2017. Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging was released in 2019. All were published by the MIT Press. A book on irony and sarcasm will be published in May 2020. Changing Minds, is available in hardcover, as an ebook, and also as an audiobook.

The material in Changing Minds that pertains to dementia can be found in chapter six. One section of that chapter, call “The Destroyer of Minds,” reviews the research on how language is affected by dementia. We focus on the case of Iris Murdoch, the British author and philosopher whose final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, shows evidence of language problems that are characteristic of the disease. In a section titled “Lessons from the Nuns,” we review the work of David Snowdon, who showed that differences in idea density in narratives written early in life was predictive of the development of Alzheimer’s disease decades later. In other sections of that chapter, we summarize research showing an association between reading and writing with longevity.

Linguistic changes associated with dementia include reductions in vocabulary size, the use of more lexical fillers (such as well or uh), and less specific nouns (we, they, something, everything).

Compared to those who autobiographical essays make frequent reference to negative emotions, expressions of positive emotions are associated with a longer life.

Just as a physician would encourage people to keep moving, we would encourage people to keep writing and to keep reading to maintain their cognitive health.

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You can learn more about Dr. Kreuz on his website.

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