Objective : Many communication recovery strategies should be used when communication breakdowns occur for successful communication, however, communication problems increase due to inadequate use of such strategies in older people with dementia. The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference of recovery strategy between dementia and the elderly in conversational discourse. Method : The subjects were eight of Alzheimer s dementia and 10 general elderly. Conversation discourse tasks were conducted face-to-face with the subjects. Communication breakdown and communication recovery strategies were analyzed based on 200 utterances collected in the conversation discourse. Result : First, the AD group had more communication breakdown than the control group, but the recovery rate did not differ between the groups. Second, in the AD group, the nonspecific recovery strategy and the clarification demand strategy were used as the expression strategy. The recovery rate after using expressive strategy was more than 90% in explanation strategy, combined strategy, nonspecific repair strategy, and repetition confirmation strategy. The response strategy used a lot of paraphrase strategy and combined strategies, and the recovery rate after using the response strategy was 100% for the simplification strategy, repeat strategy and gesture strategy. Conclusion : The AD group showed more breakdown of research subjects and breakdown of researchers than control group, and it showed ability to use various expression strategy and response strategy though there was difference in repair rate between communication repair strategy. AD group used nonspecific repair strategy in expression strategy the most and paraphrase strategy in response strategy the most. This shows different characteristic from ordinary elderly people. Therefore, it is necessary to utilize this repair strategy for rehabilitation of AD elderly.