title: Impaired recognition of meaningful sounds in Alzheimer's disease.
abstract: We studied recognition of meaningful nonverbal sounds using a sound-picture matching test in 18 patients with senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT) and 19 age-matched controls. A significant impairment of sound recognition was found in the SDAT group, consistent with auditory sound agnosia. Although sound recognition performance correlated significantly with auditory verbal comprehension scores, a sound recognition defect was also identifiable in the subgroup of patients with SDAT who had normal verbal comprehension. Qualitative analysis of sound recognition errors revealed that nonaphasic patients with SDAT made predominantly acoustic errors, whereas semantic errors were found almost exclusively in aphasic patients. These findings suggest that the auditory sound agnosia of patients with SDAT may be subdivided into perceptual-discriminative and semantic-associative types.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, University of Arizona, Tucson.
authors.forename: S Z
authors.initials: SZ
authors.lastname: Rapcsak
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kentros
authors.forename: A B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Rubens
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001037:Aphasia / Q000503:physiopathology; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology