LEXICAL DECISIONS IN PATIENTS WITH ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE - SOME NOTES ONAUTOMATIC VERSUS CONTROLLED PROCESSING

This study examined the lexical decisions of age, gender and education matched groups of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and normally aging (NA) su bjects. The subjects were asked to make lexical decisions on real word , pseudoword and nonword orthographic stimuli. Analysis of the data re vealed that the accuracy of the lexical decisions of the AD group was comparable to those of their NA peers for real word stimuli, but signi ficantly different for the pseudo-word and non-word stimuli. The findi ngs appeared to support the notion that AD patients' single word decod ing may be disrupted in a way that is not readily apparent during the mild stages of the disease course. (C) 1996 by Elsevier Science Inc.