CATEGORY-SPECIFIC DIFFICULTY NAMING WITH VERBS IN ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE

We studied 20 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) on a picture-nami ng task consisting of frequency-matched pahs of nouns and verbs that w ere homophonic and homographic (e.g., paint). Intragroup comparisons r evealed that verb naming is significantly more difficult for patients with AD than noun naming. An error analysis demonstrated that patients with AD produce significantly more semantic and descriptive errors fo r verbs than nouns. We correlated verb naming and noun naming with mea sures of grammatical comprehension, lexical retrieval, and visuopercep tual processing, but there were no selective effects for verbs compare d with nouns. Differences in the mental representation of concepts und erlying verbs and nouns may account, in part, for the relative difficu lty naming with verbs in AD.