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. 2009 Oct;111(1):8-19.
doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2009.07.009. Epub 2009 Aug 21.

A common mechanism in verb and noun naming deficits in Alzheimer's patients

Amit Almor  1 , Justin M Aronoff, Maryellen C MacDonald, Laura M Gonnerman, Daniel Kempler, Houri Hintiryan, Unja L Hayes, Sudha Arunachalam, Elaine S Andersen
Affiliations

A common mechanism in verb and noun naming deficits in Alzheimer's patients

Amit Almor et al. Brain Lang. 2009 Oct.

Abstract

We tested the ability of Alzheimer's patients and elderly controls to name living and non-living nouns, and manner and instrument verbs. Patients' error patterns and relative performance with different categories showed evidence of graceful degradation for both nouns and verbs, with particular domain-specific impairments for living nouns and instrument verbs. Our results support feature-based, semantic representations for nouns and verbs and support the role of inter-correlated features in noun impairment, and the role of noun knowledge in instrument verb impairment.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Noun and verb naming accuracy (a) and naming latency (b) for both groups. Error bars show the standard error of the mean.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The relation between patients’ age and noun-verb accuracy impairment difference scores.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Naming accuracy and correct response latencies by category for nouns and verbs. Categories are sorted from right to left by semantic domain (living vs. non-living nouns and instrument vs. manner verbs) and by AD patients accuracy within each domain. A line graph is used to highlight the similarity in the overall pattern of the two groups and not as indicating an underlying continuous scale. Error bars show the standard error of the mean.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Distribution of semantic errors for nouns and verbs for the EN and AD groups and for high and low performing AD subgroups. Error rates are shown as percentages from the total number of semantic errors (contrast coordinate, superordinate, cross category, and don’t know). Error bars show the standard error of the mean.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Naming accuracy for living and non-living nouns (a) and manner and instrument verbs (b). Error bars show the standard error of the mean.
Figure 6
Figure 6
The relation between AD patients’ noun-verb and living-non-living accuracy impairment difference scores.
Figure 7
Figure 7
The relation between patients’ noun accuracy and their (a) living-non-living impairment difference scores and (b) manner-instrument impairment difference scores.
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