Word reading profile in Alzheimer’s disease in French

Objectives. To date, little is known about the reading profile of French-speaking Alzheimer patients and the type of reading errors they make as the disease progresses. Studies conducted in English report difficulties in reading irregular words (words that have exceptional grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences) leading to regularization errors (reading pint to rhyme with mint). Given that French has also many irregular words, our study aims at investigating word reading abilities in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methods. A word reading aloud task developed for the study was administered to 42 participants (age= 77.6 +/- 6.2): 25 healthy elderly (MMSE 29 +/- 0.7), 8 Mild AD (MiAD) (MMSE 22.7 +/- 1.3) and 9 moderate AD (MoAD) (MMSE 16.4 +/- 1.6). The task consists of 4x32 words: high frequency regular words (HFRw), low frequency regular words (LFRw), high frequency irregular words (HFIw) and low frequency irregular words (LFIw). Word groups are matched for several variables. Results. A repeated-measures ANOVA showed a significant group*type of word interaction effect (F=11.289; p<.001). MiAD perform similarly as the control group on the whole task. MoAD perform significantly worse than the other groups on HFIw and LFIw (mostly producing regularization errors) and LFRw (p<.001) (producing visual and phonological errors). However, they perform similarly to MiAD and controls on HFR words (p>.1). Conclusions. MiAD show preserved reading abilities while MoAD exhibit reading difficulties for HFIw, LFIw and LFRw but preserved reading abilities for HFRw. The next step will be to investigate these errors by studying the underlying processes of reading in AD.