Verb Confrontation Naming and Word-Picture Matching in Alzheimer's Disease

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were asked to name pictures and perform a multiple-choice word-picture matching task with verbs and nouns. AD patients were significantly more impaired with verbs than nouns for both naming and word-picture matching, and their patterns of semantic naming errors differed for verbs and nouns. One subgroup of AD patients was compromised on both naming and word-picture matching consistent with a semantic memory deficit. Naming was worse for verbs than for nouns in these patients, and they produced significantly fewer hierarchically related semantic substitutions for verbs than for nouns. Other AD patients without semantic memory difficulty did not demonstrate these form class-sensitive patterns. The investigators hypothesize that form class-specific effects in AD patients' naming are due in part to differences in processing verbs and nouns in semantic memory.