Final answer:
As dementia such as Alzheimer's disease progresses, individuals like Rosa lose their ability to communicate effectively through language and may become increasingly reliant on body language and behaviors to express themselves due to the spread of brain damage affecting areas responsible for language and executive functions.
Step-by-step explanation:
As a person's dementia progresses, their ability to communicate effectively indeed diminishes. Such individuals may increasingly rely on body language and behaviors to express themselves. This is because dementia can affect language areas of the brain, leading to problems with word retrieval, sentence structure, and the ability to understand or produce language. Consequently, those with advanced dementia might use facial expressions, gestures, or other nonverbal cues as alternative means of communication.
For someone like Rosa, who is affected by Alzheimer's disease (AD), the deterioration of language skills is evident. Although she can follow directions and understand basic language like "yes" and "no," she's unable to produce words and can no longer write, pointing to the involvement of key language areas in the brain. Moreover, the changes in her mood and personality, as well as her cognitive decline, like having difficulty managing finances, suggest the spread of damage across the cerebrum, particularly affecting the frontal lobe, which controls executive functions such as planning, self-control, and abstract thought.
The presence of these symptoms indicates that even if formal language skills are lost, individuals like Rosa may still be able to communicate their needs and emotions in other ways, highlighting the importance of being attentive to nonverbal cues in care.