REPETITION OF SINGLE WORDS AND NONWORDS IN ALZHEIMERS-DISEASE

Repetition of single words and pronounceable nonwords (pseudowords) wa s assessed in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients to evaluate how lexica l phonological processing might be accomplished when semantic and conc eptual knowledge is impaired. AD patients performed significantly wors e than healthy elderly controls on all repetition tasks. However, repe tition abilities and dementia severity were not correlated, and AD pat ients produced the same distribution of error types as controls. Furth ermore, despite their semantic problems, AD patients, Like controls, s howed a significant advantage for repeating real words compared to pse udowords, even when repeating low frequency phonologically complex wor ds whose meaning is not likely to have been retained. The results supp ort the postulated existence of a lexical phonological system that is used to repeat both known and novel words and that processes linguisti c information independent of its meaning.