Therefore, it is often difficult to determine, in cases of comprehension impairment, precisely why a sentence is misunderstood. This is particularly true for patients with Alzheimer's disease, who have both severe semantic and working memory disorders. This task has the advantages of measuring comprehension as the sentence is processed and not requiring the subjects to reflect on, or make judgments about, the sentence meaning afterward. The results suggest that patients with Alzheimer's disease can successfully process sentences with relatively complex meanings as they hear them. Therefore, these patients' sentence comprehension deficits are likely due to an inability to maintain active information in memory and not due to a purely semantic impairment.
Online techniques contrast with offline assessments, which form the core of clinical practice.
Offline measures capture the end products of the variety of cognitive operations that occur on the way to a final interpretation or response, but online techniques are capable of revealing areas of strength and weakness during language processing. In addition, clinical implications are discussed that follow from the arguments and evidence we present. A second issue was the examination of speech-language pathologists' attitudes toward accountability. A stratified random sample of 1,000 speech-language pathologists in private practice, selected by ASHA from a database, served as participants. The participants were asked to complete and return a questionnaire concerning the use of various accountability methods and their attitudes toward accountability.