# Understanding Social Communication Abilities in Individuals with Alzheimer's Disease

> **NIH NIH R03** · UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE HEALTH SCI CTR · 2021 · $166,229

## Abstract

Project summary
Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) and their caregivers
experience significant challenges in daily conversations and social communication. Yet, it is less
understood how these challenges can be effectively managed and what recommendations can
be made with respect to the strategies for both individuals with ADRD and caregivers to
optimize their optimal communication. The long-term objectives of the proposed study are to
develop efficient management strategies and to hone caregiver training and education
strategies for individuals with ADRD. Our proposed study will lay foundation to achieve these
goals through an improved understanding of the characteristics and underpinning mechanisms
of social communication deficits, namely audience design impairments in individuals with
amnestic Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Audience design is a key to successful social
communication and involves speaker modulation of their utterances depending on the partner’s
knowledge. The specific aims of the proposed research are: (1) to understand verbal and non-
verbal audience design impairments in individuals with AD and healthy older adults, and (2)
elucidate cognitive and linguistic substrates underlying the audience design skills in these
populations. We will deploy an experimental paradigm using referential communication tasks to
study communication in the lab with a high ecological validity that simulates aspects of natural
communication in everyday life. During the task, a participant and an experimenter will solve a
task that is highly dependent on interactive and dynamic communication. The participant will
repeatedly describe a set of abstract images to the experimenter; the changing properties of the
spoken and non-verbal communication over time can be used as a measure of the extent to
which partners develop shared knowledge. The participant will also describe abstract images to
different partners with different shared knowledge in multiparty conversational setting.
Performance data obtained during the communication task will be analyzed to delineate how
participants with AD tailor their language based on their partner’s perspectives. Following the
referential communication task, a standardized language and cognitive test battery will be given
to measure attention, memory, executive function, and language. The data set will be analyzed
to determine what cognitive and/or linguistic factors significantly contribute to or associated with
the observed audience design deficits. The multi-PI approach is designed to take advantage of
complementary expertise in the techniques and theories of Cognitive Science and Speech-
Language Pathology, and the resources unique to both Iowa and Tennessee.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10195446
- **Project number:** 1R03AG072236-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE HEALTH SCI CTR
- **Principal Investigator:** Eun Jin Paek
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $166,229
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-04-15 → 2023-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10195446

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10195446, Understanding Social Communication Abilities in Individuals with Alzheimer's Disease (1R03AG072236-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10195446. Licensed CC0.

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