| Abstract: | A number of investigators have suggested that unlike the normal elderly population, patients with Alzheimer's disease have a severe semantic-memory deficit. However, the semantic-memory tasks used in previous studies have been confounded by the heavy demands they placed on effortful processing. In the present study, 20 demented (mean age 71 yrs) and 20 normal (mean age 69.8 yrs) elderly Ss were given a battery of episodic-memory tasks and 3 tasks that examined how intact and accessible their semantic memory was under conditions that did not require effortful processing. Although the demented Ss were greatly inferior to the normal Ss on the episodic-memory tests, they performed equally well on the semantic-memory test: The naming latency of both groups was equally facilitated by a semantic prime, the recall accuracy of both normal and demented elderly for a string of letters was similarly affected by the degree to which the string approximated English orthography, and recall accuracy for a string of words was affected equally in the 2 groups by the degree to which the word string obeyed syntactic and semantic rules. (42 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
