The influence of age of acquisition on recall and recognition in Alzheimer’s patients and healthy ageing controls in Turkish

Abstract

The current study set out to examine the influence of AoA on word recall and recognition tasks in 30 Alzheimer’s patients and 28 healthy ageing control group. Each participant was presented with 20 words that critically varied on AoA. A subtest of WAIS-R was employed to establish the vocabulary capacity of participants together with the Mini-Mental State Examination. The pattern of results showed that healthy ageing adults outperformed Alzheimer’s patients in recall and recognition tasks and that overall early acquired words had an advantage over late acquired words. The results have implications for developing assessment tools and are discussed within the current theories of age of acquisition and the impact of the neurodegenerative loss of memory in Alzheimer's disease on lexicosemantic processing.

Keywords:

• Ageing
• age of acquisition
• Alzheimer’s disease
• episodic memory
• recall
• recognition
• Turkish

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our thanks to three anonymous reviewers and the editor, Dr Horton, for their constructive feedback during the review process. The first author would like to thank her supervisors, Dr Simay İkier and Dr Serkan Şener, for their input into the completion of her MSc dissertation where part of the data came from. Our heartfelt gratitude goes to all our participants especially to those with Alzheimer’s disease for without them this study would not have been possible.