Idiom Processing in Persian-speaking Alzheimer's Patients

In this research, the ability of five Persian-speaking Alzheimer's patients in processing 30 familiar, transparent, non-ambiguous idioms with 10 control subjects who were matched with Alzheimer's patients with respect to age and education has been investigated via oral explanation and force choice tasks. Furthermore, subject's linguistic abilities were assessed using lexical comprehension and semantic fluency tasks and their executive system ability was investigated through stroop color and clock drawing tasks. The results show patient's deficit in idiom comprehension. The weak performance of patients in cognitive and semantic fluency tasks and the relation between cognitive, executive, and idiom comprehension tasks highlight that a set of semantic, executive and cognitive variables affect patient's performance in idiom comprehension. Subject's tendency in interpreting literal meaning of idiom is in accord with those models of idiom processing as Idiom List Hypothesis of Borbrow and Bell ( 1973) or The Configuration Hypothesis of Cacciari and Tabossi (1988) which emphasized on the initial processing of idioms