[Communication, discourse and dementia].

The construction-integration model (Kintsch, 1988) offers a frame for discourse analysis. This model defines four representation levels: the surface level or linguistic form, the base text or semantic level, the situation model built by combining information from the text and personal world knowledge, and the organization level. This study describes discourse produced by 46 Alzheimer patients and 53 normal elderly subjects in two picture-elicited production tasks: a single picture and a sequence of pictures. Globally, the single picture task is a more difficult situation for Alzheimer patients. The impaired levels in dementia are surface level, situation model and organization. Therefore, Kintsch model allows a distinction among discourse productions by normal elderly and mild to moderate Alzheimer patients.