Narrative discourse of young and older brazilian adults associated with demographic factors

Abstract

Purpose: 1) Compare the discourse performance between young and older adults from the Brazilian Federal District (DF); 2) Compare the mean discourse performance of participants from the DF with the normative discourse of a population from a different region of the country; 3) Verify whether the variables age, educational level and socioeconomic status and scores on the cognitive, behavioral and functional screening tests were associated with discourse performance. Method: A total of 60 healthy volunteers from the DF, 30 older adults and 30 young adults, were selected. Participants were divided into two subgroups according to educational level: low education and high education. The four narrative discourse subtests of the Montreal Communication Evaluation Battery, Brazilian Portuguese version (MAC-BR) were applied to the study sample. Results: Discourse scores of the older adults were statistically higher than those of the young adults. The discourse scores in the high education group were also better than those in the low education group, with statistically significant difference observed in only one of the MAC-BR subtests. Discourse performance was associated with the sociodemographic variable and the scores on the cognitive and functional screening tests. The discourse performance of the DF sample differed from the national normative discourse with statistically significant difference. Conclusion: The discourse performance of older adults from the Brazilian Federal District differed from that of young adults from the same region, as well as from that of older adults from southern Brazil. Discourse performance was associated with several different variables.