Effect of an unfamiliar accent on the repetition ability of normal elders and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease

Understanding how cultural variables influence communicative interaction is crucial for speech-language pathologists, who increasingly come from diverse cultural backgrounds and also provide services to a culturally diverse clientele. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of a cultural variable, namely familiar and unfamiliar accent, on the speech discrimination and phrase repetition performance of nondemented, elderly individuals and individuals diagnosed with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). Results obtained on the Wilcoxon signed-rank nonparametric test demonstrated that an unfamiliar accent significantly and adversely affected the test performance of bath groups.