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Brain Advance Access originally published online on August 11, 2004
Brain 2004 127(10):2299-2306; doi:10.1093/brain/awh264
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Brain Vol. 127 No. 10 © Guarantors of Brain 2004; all rights reserved

The effects of ageing and Alzheimer's disease on semantic and gender priming

Rosa Manenti1,2, Claudia Repetto1, Simone Bentrovato3, Alessandra Marcone1, Elizabeth Bates4,{dagger} and Stefano F. Cappa1

1 Cognitive Neuroscience Center, Vita Salute University and San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, 2 IRCCS S. Giovanni di Dio-Fatebenefratelli, Brescia, 3 Istituto di Psicologia, Università ‘La Sapienza’, Rome, Italy and 4 Center for Research in Language, University of California at San Diego, San Diego, USA

Correspondence to: Stefano F. Cappa, MD, Vita Salute University and San Raffaele Scientific Institute, DIBIT, Via Olgettina 58, 20132 Milano, Italy E-mail cappa.stefano{at}hsr.it

Normal ageing as well as age-associated pathological conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, are associated with modifications of language processing. In particular, an impaired performance in semantic tasks, associated with relatively spared syntactic processing, has been suggested to be the hallmark of the language disorder of Alzheimer's disease. The present experiment tests semantic and syntactic aspects of language processing at the same time, using an on-line paradigm, in patients with Alzheimer's disease, compared with elderly and young controls. Normal ageing was associated with a profile of performance, which was slowed but qualitatively comparable with that of young controls. Both gender agreement and congruent sentential semantics resulted in facilitation relative to baseline in young and elderly controls, with no significant interference effects of incongruent grammatical and semantic information. In contrast, Alzheimer's disease patients presented both facilitation and interference effects. These findings suggest that interference effects are amplified by dementia, and may result from defective inhibitory processes due to Alzheimer's disease pathology.


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