Word stem completion in young adults, elderly adults, and patients with Alzheimer's disease: evidence from cross-modal priming.
A cross-modality priming paradigm was used to examine the contribution of conceptual processing operations to performance on a word stem-completion task. Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), healthy elderly controls, and healthy young controls, studied words presented under two conditions, (1) visually and (2) orally, and were subsequently tested using a visual stem-completion task. AD patients were impaired relative to controls on stem completion. All groups showed a significant within-modality priming effect (visual study/visual test) but no significant cross-modal effect (auditory study/visual test), the latter taken to indicate a lack of a conceptual component in the stem-completion task. The results are discussed in relation to theories of priming deficits in AD patients.
Neuropsychology Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Old Aberdeen AB24 2UB, Scotland, UK. mcgeorge@abdn.ac.uk
Peter
P
McGeorge
Lynne
L
Taylor
Sergio
S
Della Sala
Michael F
MF
Shanks