“I don’t know who you are”: anomia for people’s names in Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT

It is well known that difficulty in the retrieval of people’s names is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia (ADD), but there is a controversy about the nature of this deficit. In this study, we analyzed whether the nature of the difficulty in retrieving proper names in ADD reflects pre-semantic, semantic, or post-semantic difficulties. To do so, 85 older adults, 35 with ADD and 50 cognitively healthy (CH), completed a task with famous faces involving: recognition, naming, semantic questions, and naming with phonological cues. The ADD group scored lower than the CH group in all tasks. Both groups showed a greater capacity for recognition than naming, but this difference was more pronounced in the ADD group. Additionally, the ADD group showed significantly fewer semantic errors than the CH group. Overall results suggest that the difficulties people with ADD have in naming reflect a degradation at semantic level.

KEYWORDS:

• Naming
• proper names
• anomia
• Alzheimer’s disease
• semantic knowledge

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the older participants and their families, who contributed generously with their time, as well as the different senior centers that enabled us to do our research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [T.S.], upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

Research funded by Universidad Complutense de Madrid (CT82/20-CT83/20) Banco Santander [CT82/20-CT83/20].