Knowledge of Concept Meanings in Alzheimer's Disease

The present study focuses on semantic deficits in Alzheimer's disease (AD). We distinguish three different levels of semantic knowledge: (1) lexical, (2) semantic-conceptual, (3) conscious understanding. We devised methods that tap levels (2) and (3). Our aim was to determine how much guidance...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cortex 1997-03, Vol.33 (1), p.27-45
Main Authors: Laatu, Sari, Portin, Raija, Revonsuo, Antti, Tuisku, Seppo, Rinne, Juha
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aged
Alzheimer Disease - psychology
Female
Humans
Male
Neuropsychological Tests
Psychiatric Status Rating Scales
Semantics
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Summary:The present study focuses on semantic deficits in Alzheimer's disease (AD). We distinguish three different levels of semantic knowledge: (1) lexical, (2) semantic-conceptual, (3) conscious understanding. We devised methods that tap levels (2) and (3). Our aim was to determine how much guidance AD patients need to consciously access a given semantic-conceptual field and how well they can understand the meanings of concepts and semantic relations. Four different tasks were used to tap different kinds of concepts, the relationships between concepts and their attributes, and the hierarchical structure among different concepts. The retrieval demands of the tasks were eased by presenting guiding questions. The results revealed that AD patients have deficient voluntary access to semantic-conceptual representations. The deficits persist even in passive recognition and forced-choice tasks. We conclude that AD patients have a generalized access deficit, although some aspects of the results are suggestive of storage deficit.
ISSN:0010-9452
1973-8102
DOI:10.1016/S0010-9452(97)80003-2