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Brain Advance Access published online on April 3, 2006
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awl069
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org. The online version of this article has been published under an open access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the open access version of this article for non-commercial purposes provided that: the original authorship is properly and fully attributed; the Journal and Oxford University Press are attributed as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given; if an article is subsequently reproduced or disseminated not in its entirety but only in part or as a derivative work this must be clearly indicated. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Received July 19, 2005
Revised December 16, 2005
Accepted March 1, 2006

Article

Lost in semantic space: a multi-modal, non-verbal assessment of feature knowledge in semantic dementia

Peter Garrard 1 * and Erin Carroll 2

1 University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, UK; Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, London, UK
2 University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, UK

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Peter Garrard, E-mail: p.garrard{at}ucl.ac.uk


  Abstract

A novel, non-verbal test of semantic feature knowledge is introduced, enabling subordinate knowledge of four important concept attributes--colour, sound, environmental context and motion--to be individually probed. This methodology provides more specific information than existing non-verbal semantic tests about the status of attribute knowledge relating to individual concept representations. Performance on this test of a group of 12 patients with semantic dementia (10 male, mean age: 64.4 years) correlated strongly with their scores on more conventional tests of semantic memory, such as naming and word-to-picture matching. The test's overlapping structure, in which individual concepts were probed in two, three or all four modalities, provided evidence of performance consistency on individual items between feature conditions. Group and individual analyses revealed little evidence for differential performance across the four feature conditions, though sound and colour correlated most strongly, and motion least strongly, with other semantic tasks, and patients were less accurate on the motion features of living than non-living concepts (with no such conceptual domain differences in the other conditions). The results are discussed in the context of their implications for the place of semantic dementia within the classification of progressive aphasic syndromes, and for contemporary models of semantic representation and organization.

Keywords: connectionist modelling; motion; semantic dementia; semantic features; semantic memory.
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