Priming semantic relations in patients with Huntington's disease.
To investigate the hypothesis that Huntington's Disease involves a breakdown in the organization of the lexico-semantic representational system, mildly and moderately demented patients with Huntington's Disease and age-matched normal control subjects were given a brief battery of language tests and a semantic priming free association task. Results of the language tests provided suggestive, but confounded, evidence for a semantic deficit in Huntington's Disease. Less equivocal evidence was yielded by results of the priming task, which showed a decline in the effect of association strength of primed stimulus-target word pairs on target hit rates. This finding was interpreted as a disruption in the system of spreading activation in a lexico-semantic network. This breakdown was contrasted with the more severe language deficits found in dementias which are primarily cortical in origin.
D003704:Dementia / Q000523:psychology*; D005608:Free Association; D006801:Humans; D006816:Huntington Disease / Q000523:psychology*; D007807:Language Tests; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012660:Semantics