Preservation of ambiguous word meanings in patients with Alzheimer's disease Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Abstract

Although many investigators claim that Alzheimer's disease (AD) disrupts the basic structure of semantic knowledge, there is relatively little direct evidence for such a disruption. Our study examined the structure of ambiguous word meanings in AD patients as revealed by the relative frequency with which they generated the various senses of an ambiguous word. We investigated whether AD patients are differentially impaired in generating either the more common or the rarer meanings of ambiguous words. Twenty normal old subjects and 20 AD patients were asked to generate as many meanings as possible for each of five ambiguous homographs. Although AD patients produced fewer meanings than did the normal old subjects, the relative frequency with which the patients generated the different meanings of an ambiguous word did not differ from that seen in the normal old subjects. Thus, this study did not yield any evidence for a disruption of semantic structure in AD.