Essa música me faz lembrar... A Consciência Linguística que emerge da Música: Idosos com Alzheimer no Brasil e em Portugal

Abstract

This thesis addresses Linguistic Awareness in elderly people with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) in Brazil and Portugal, submitted to musical listening. There is an increase number of elderly people and dementia in these countries, despite the twenty-first century's most unusual and impacting worldwide epidemiological disorder, the Sars-Cov-2 virus, in the population over sixty years old. Aging is a biological and sociocultural process, characterized by structural changes in human anatomy and personal identity. Elderly has both significant degenerative and phenotypic plasticity organism, as claimed by recent research in Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, whose theoretical postulates were fundamental to the present study, since they reveal the old brain's evolutionary adaptation when it comes to emotion and cognition, especially when subjected to certain treatments. Current studies recognize compensatory brain reactions in the context of music application use and the consequent production of oxytocin, offering subsidies for this new investigative problem: would the notion of neurological adaptation allow to reflect the existence of a Linguistic Consciousness in elderly people with AD? Therefore, it is necessary to describe the demographic profile of the elderly with AD in the application locus, according to the implications of the age pyramid to understand the reaction of the elderly with Alzheimer's to music to highlight the underlying Linguistic Awareness. Comparative analyzes of the formal aspects of the Portuguese language linked to the perception of affective and social reactions are possible beyond the status quo of literature, which stops the generalization of deterioration, to the detriment of neurolinguistic adaptation. In this investigative proposal, the literature review goes beyond the disciplinary limits of Linguistics, adding five empirical research data collection and coding methods, namely: Sociodemographic, Behavioral and Clinical Factors Questionnaire; Informant on Cognitive Decline in the Elderly Questionnaire (IQCODE); Mini Mental State Examination (MEEM); Linguistic Awareness Test in the Elderly (TCLI); and Thematic Questions Roadmap (RPT), among which, the last two were applied in interactive communication context involving music. The result validation was carried out by the constitution of a control group, consisting of typical elderly people, submitted to identical experiments. The methodological procedures provided confirmation of the existence of Linguistic Consciousness in elderly people with AD, verifiable with the exposure of participants to music, whether regarding some metalinguistic aspects of consciousness or to discourses measured in the interviewees' autobiographical memory capacity, considering the cognitive-functional relationship and psycholinguistics for the referred pathology. Once we confirmed the hypothesis that the elderly people with AD react positively to music, one may affirm that there is Linguistic Awareness in the different stages of the disease, proportional to the neurological and psychic conditions of all stages of human life cycle.