The present report describes features of the language, especially some of the discursive aspects of healthy elderly or with mild cognitive decline or with mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease. A total of 44 elderly were evaluated, including 22 healthy, 4 with mild cognitive decline, 9 with mild Alzheimer disease and 9 with moderate Alzheimer's disease, classified by the CDR criteria. Mini-mental state examination, the short version of Boston naming, verbal fluency and narrative tests by visual confrontation (based on the oral description of picture cookie theft) were applied. Performances were estimated on the selected tests and the oral narratives were classified and assessed using Groves - Wright criteria. Parametric statistical tests were applied and the level of significant statistical differences was set at p<0.05. An inventory and analysis of the lexicon and grammatical categories from the oral narratives were performed using Z scores. To that end the STABLEX software was applied. As compared with mild cognitive decline it was found that semantic verbal fluency is better in the healthy elderly. The narratives showed statistically significant differences between healthy elderly and mild cognitive impairment in the analysis of frequency of use of vocabulary and grammatical categories as a whole, and statistically significant differences between healthy and all other groups in the analysis of each grammatical category. The analysis of the vocabulary and grammatical categories allowed to identify impairments of narrative function as measured by the type of vocabulary and preferred or rejected grammatical categories. The results contribute to distinguish the characteristics of the narrative of healthy elderly, elderly with mild cognitive decline or with mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease, pointing out early changes in language aspects that may possibly be used to evaluate the progression of the disease.
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