Spoken discourse in Alzheimer' disease: a review

In its typical form, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) manifests with early impairment in episodic memory. Evidence suggests that language deficits also occur early on in the disease process, and can be detected at the preclinical stage, suggesting that language could constitute an important diagnostic marker for disease. Additionally, a number of variant clinical presentations of AD are recognised, due to an atypical distribution of pathology at onset, including a minority of patients presenting with a slowly progressive language impairment. We review language performance in typical and atypical presentations of AD, and describe a series of recent, novel findings examining the language phenotype of typical AD