title: Is confrontation naming performance in Alzheimer's disease the nominal linguistic retrogenesis of normal development?
abstract: We investigated confrontation naming performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and normal children (NC) to see if the nature of naming performance of AD patients is the reversal of that in normal development. Sixty items of the Boston Naming Test were given to 78 AD patients (and 40 age- and education-matched normal elderly) and 1,080 NC (3- to 14-year-olds). The analyses revealed that, firstly, the naming abilities of the AD patients demonstrated an inverse relationship with those of the NC. Secondly, from the clinical point of view, AD patients tended to lose vocabulary acquired later first while maintaining those acquired in earlier stages of development. Based on the findings, we claimed that this phenomenon was 'a nominal retrogenesis' in which 'retrogenesis' is 'the process by which degenerative mechanisms reverse the order of acquisition in normal development' as defined by Reisberg and colleagues.
authors.affiliation: Graduate Program in Speech and Language Pathology, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. h.kim@yonsei.ac.kr
authors.forename: HyangHee
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Ji Hye
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Yoon
authors.forename: Ji Eun
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Eun Jin
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Baek
authors.forename: Young H
authors.initials: YH
authors.lastname: Sohn
authors.forename: Duk L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Na
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000150:complications*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology*; D002658:Developmental Disabilities / Q000209:etiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D009275:Names; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology; D014825:Vocabulary