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Updated: Aug 16, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Word association in early Alzheimer's disease
Tamar H Gollan1, David P Salmon, Jessica L Paxton
1Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, USA. tgollan@ucsd.edu
Abstract:
The hypothesis that Alzheimer's disease (AD) degrades semantic representations predicts that AD qualitatively alters spontaneous thoughts. In two experiments contrasting free associations to words with strong (e.g., bride-groom) versus weak (e.g., body-leg) associates participants with AD produced less common responses (e.g., bride-pretty) than normal controls but only for words with strong associations, and only on the first (but not on second or third) association response. Furthermore, all participants produced fewer semantically related responses to words with weak associates. Because strong associations should be retrieved more easily than weak associations these results are problematic for retrieval-based accounts of AD. Instead we propose that AD entails a semantic deficit, and that strong associations involve more semantic processing than weak associations (in all speakers).
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