Language Disorders and Music Therapy in Dementia : A Psycholinguistic Case Study From Alive Inside (2014)

Rafliansyah, Mochammad (2026) Language Disorders and Music Therapy in Dementia : A Psycholinguistic Case Study From Alive Inside (2014). Sarjana thesis, UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung.

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Abstract

Dementia is a progressive condition that damages memory, cognition, and communication, disrupting language across lexical, prosodic, grammatical, and pragmatic domains. This study examines psycholinguistic language disorders in dementia and analyses how familiar music facilitates lexical retrieval and verbal initiation, using the language behaviour of two dementia patients, Henry and Mary Lou, as documented in Alive Inside (Rossato-Bennett, 2014) as the object of research. Data were analysed using Levelt's Speech Production Model, Ullman's Declarative/Procedural Model, and Collins and Loftus's Spreading Activation Theory through a qualitative descriptive approach. The findings show that before music exposure, both subjects demonstrated severe disorders across all four domains such as anomia and word retrieval failure at the lexical level, flat and irregular speech at the prosodic level, incomplete sentences and grammatical errors at the grammatical level, and collapsed communicative intent at the pragmatic level. After music exposure, all four domains recovered meaningfully, familiar music restored verbal initiation first and lexical retrieval second, recovering words that were stored but had become unreachable rather than creating new ones. The study concludes that dementia does not erase language but disconnects the speaker from it, and that familiar music can temporarily restore that connection through preserved autobiographical memory pathways, suggesting its value as a non-pharmacological tool for communication support in dementia care.

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