The effectiveness of speech-language therapy at the discursive level: a case study of cognitive-linguistic deficit in dementia.

People with dementia present cognitive, language and behavioral impairments. The language deficits can be identified in the speech of these patients in the early stages. However, there are still few studies about the effectiveness of speech-language therapy in these cases. This study aimed to describe the language manifestations observed in the speech of a patient with a linguistic-cognitive disorder and to analyze the effectiveness of speech-language therapy. A longitudinal single-case study with a patient with mild to moderate mixed dementia was carried out. The patient underwent pre- and post-speech-language therapy evaluation with the Oral comprehension and the Narrative discourse subtests of the MTL-Brazil Battery and The Dog Story test. We observed severe impairments of the oral comprehension and deficits involving the micro and macrolinguistic dimensions of the discourse, with a score of 2/10 in the oral discourse evaluation index. After the speech-language therapy, the patient achieved adequate performance in the Oral Comprehension subtests (words, sentences and text) and the Oral Narrative discourse (number of words and information units) of the MTL-Brazil Battery. In The Dog Story test, the participant obtained better performance in the discourse production regarding the items lexical change and syntactic complexity (microlinguistic dimension) and macroproposition (macrolinguistic dimension), achieving a score of 5/10 on the index. It is possible to state that the speech-language therapy was effective in the short term for this patient with linguistic-cognitive disorder and impairments in the discursive level of the language.