Acquisition of a new color name in amnesics and normal controls

Six Korsakoffs amnesics, three mixed amnesics, and eight normal controls were taught the meaning of "bice", the word for a particular shade of blue-green. The conceptual interpretation that the Korsakoffs developed for "bice" differed in three respects from the one that the controls developed. (1) Although both Korsakoffs and controls applied the term more liberally to pens than to other objects, two of the Korsakoffs showed an extreme form of this tendency. (2) The Korsakoffs tended to generalize more broadly along the spectral dimension in using the term. (3) Whereas there was a positive relationship, in the data for the controls, between measures of syntactic and semantic awareness concerning "bice", there was no such relationship in the Korsakoffs data. It was concluded that the Korsakoffs had difficulty mastering the new word, and difficulty specifically in integrating their representation for the word with the rest of their lexical knowledge.