Semantic versus phonological false recognition in aging and Alzheimer's disease
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Updated: Sep 26, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Andrew E Budson1, Alison L Sullivan, Kirk R Daffner
1Division of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115, USA. abudson@partners.org
Abstract:
Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been found to exhibit lower levels of false recognition of semantic associates compared with healthy older adults. Because these patients may show impaired performance of episodic and semantic memory tasks, this finding could be explained by deficits in episodic memory, semantic memory, or both. The authors adapted a paradigm for comparison of semantic versus phonological false recognition. They found that: (a) patients with AD exhibited lower levels of corrected false recognition of semantic, phonological, and hybrid (mixed semantic and phonological) lists than older adults, and (b) patients with AD showed very similar levels of false recognition for all list types. These results suggest that only episodic memory deficits are necessary to explain the lower level of false recognition of semantic associates observed in patients with AD when compared to older adults. Additionally, (c) older adults showed greater levels of semantic, phonological, and hybrid false recognition than younger adults, extending previous false recognition research of semantically related words and categorized colored photographs to phonologically related words.
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