Lexical but not semantic priming in Alzheimer's disease.

Publication/Presentation Date

12-1-1991

Abstract

The hypothesis that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have a disturbance in semantic processing was tested using a new lexical-priming task, threshold oral reading. Healthy elderly controls showed significant effects of priming for word pairs that are associatively related (words that reliably co-occur in word association tests) and for word pairs that are semantically related (high-frequency exemplars that belong to the same superordinate category but are not high-frequency associates). AD patients showed effects of priming for associatively related words but not for word pairs that are related only by shared semantic features. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that semantic processing is impaired in AD and suggest that independent networks of relationships among words and among concepts in semantic memory may be differentially disrupted with various forms of brain damage.

Volume

6

Issue

4

First Page

522

Last Page

527

ISSN

0882-7974

Disciplines

Medicine and Health Sciences | Psychiatry

PubMedID

1777139

Department(s)

Department of Psychiatry

Document Type

Article

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