Abstract
Impaired aspects of categorical semantic memory in Alzheimer disease. In this work the lexical-semantic and categorical-semantic alterations in a group of patients with probable dementia Alzheimer type, were analyzed and compared with a healthy control group. The cognitive tasks that were used to analyze the aforementioned deterioration are: category definition and attribute production, classification and analogies. In the analysis of covariance carried out the following were considered the independent variables: the kind of subject, with three levels (healthy, slightly ill, and moderately ill); the kind of item or stimulus, with two levels (belonging to animated or inanimate categories); and the kind of attribute or conceptual relations. Age and educational level were considered covariants. The results reveal that age was highly significant in the majority of the tasks. The kind of group/stage of disease was highly significant in all the tasks, whereas the animate/inanimate quality of the stimuli was only significant in the sorting tasks. Lastly, the kind of attribute and/or the conceptual relations were again highly significant, as was the interaction between the latter and the disease stage.
