The role of episodic memory in semantic learning: An examination of vocabulary acquisition in a patient with amnesia due to encephalitis

Abstract

Four experiments examined the ability of the densely amnesic patient SS to acqulre novel vocabulary that entered the language after the onset of his amnesla. Experiment 1 examined SS's ability to recall and recognize the meaning of novel words; Experiment 2 utilized a semantic priming paradigm to assess his knowledge of these words under conditions in which the retrieval demands were minimized; Experiment 3 evaluated his lexical knowledge of novel words in a lexical decision task; Experiment 4 used a sentence verification paradigm to evaluate his ability to discern the correct use of novel words. SS was severely impaired across all taska. Only when the novel words were compound words consisting of well known parts, was there any evidence to suggest that he had acquired even partial knowledge about these words. This pattern of results was not attributable to a generalized semantic memory deflcit. Rather, these findings suggest that episodic memory plays an important role in the acquisltion of novel semantic Information.