The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience by Ward Jamie

Author:Ward, Jamie [Ward, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781317483168
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Early Signs of Dementia in the Language Use of Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch; 1919–1999.

© Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis.

Iris Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, was considered by both critics and her family to be something of a puzzle, in that it departed significantly in style from her previous novels. Whereas this could conceivably reflect a deliberate shift due to artistic motivations, a more likely scenario is that Murdoch was already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. This is known to affect memory and result in word-finding difficulties. The novel was published in 1995, just before her diagnosis. To investigate the changes, text from the last novel was compared with two of her earlier ones. The results found that, whereas the use of syntax and overall structure did not change, her vocabulary had changed such that she had a more restricted range of words, particularly relying more on higher frequency words than before (Garrard et al., 2005). Text analyses such as these, based on letters or diary entries, could possibly be developed in the future to lead to early diagnostic tools for diseases such as dementia of the Alzheimer’s type.

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