Alzheimer patients' ability to read words with irregular stress

The TIB, an Italian version of the National Adult Reading Test (NART), requires the subject to read out a list of Italian words with a dominant (regular) and a less frequent (irregular) stress pattern. It was given to a group of 45 patients with a diagnosis of dementia of Alzheimer type (DAT) and to a matched control group. Both the NART and the TIB are based on the assumption that the ability to translate orthography into phonology is relatively unimpaired in DAT patients. Despite the different language characteristics on which the two tests are based, the present results largely replicate those found for the NART. Patients with mild and moderate DAT did not perform differently from matched controls on the TIB, while they were impaired on the NART. Patients with severe dementia, however, also failed in the TIB test.