Generation of novel semantic representations in aging and Alzheimer’s disease

Semantic knowledge of newly coined words in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease

“…Additionally, deterioration in the heteromodal association cortices (Grossman et al, 2003) may have entailed difficulties to integrate multiple features into a coherent concept, leading to a dramatically impoverished semantic representation of new words, especially in patients with AD. For instance, the ability to combine two nouns to identify a new concept (e.g., "tiger lily") was shown to be compromised in AD patients, probably due to difficulties for selecting and integrating the semantic features that are intertwined within concepts (Taler, Kousaie, Phillips, Chertkow, & Titone, 2011). By presenting the participants with new words and asking them about their semantic content through three tasks with increasing difficulty levels, our purpose was mainly to tax semantic knowledge rather than lexical access, contrary to naming tasks.…”