A Systematic Survey of Cognitive-Communicative Evaluations

Dementia is a syndrome resulting from an acquired brain disease that affects many domains of cognitive impairment. The progressive disorder generally affects memory, attention, executive functions, communication, and other cognitive domains that significantly alter everyday function (Quinn, 2014). The purpose of this research was to gather a systematic review of cognitive-communication assessments and screeners used in assessing dementia to assist in early prognosis. From this review, there is potential in developing a new test to address the areas that people with dementia often have deficits in 1) Memory, 2) Attention, 3) Executive Functions, 4) Language, and 5) Visuospatial Skills. In the field of speech-language pathology, or medicine in general, there is no one assessment that can diagnose dementia. Additionally, this review will explore identifying speech and language characteristics of dementia through speech analytics to theoretically help clinicians identify early signs of dementia.