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Abstract:
Word finding difficulty, or anomia, is perhaps the biggest
language and memory problem Alzheimer's Disease patients
experience. Anomia is not restricted to AD, but is experienced by
old and young adults, and increases with age. Efforts to understand
anomia have focused largely on semantic memory, and less is known
about the role of phonology. Retrieval of anomic targets can be
aided by similar-sounding or similar-meaning words. For example, if
you are unable to produce the word "TABLE", you might be helped by
a phonological cue ("CABLE") or a semantic cue ("CHAIR"). Competing
hypotheses of facilitation or inhibition of semantic and/or
phonological cues have been offered in priming paradigms. In our
study, AD patients and aged adults were presented with a
word-picture priming task in which they had to name pictures
preceded by words related in sound (glamour-hammer), related in
meaning (screwdriver-hammer), unrelated words (strawberry-hammer),
or by neutral cues (XXXXX-hammer). AD patients had normal priming
for their age, but slower reaction times (RTs). Pictures following
phonological cues were named as quickly as pictures following
neutral or unrelated cues, but more quickly than pictures following
semantic cues. These findings indicate that information
semantically related to a desired target word may actually inhibit
its retrieval in aging and AD.
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