Enhancement of word completion priming in amnesics by cueing with previously novel associates

Seventeen amnesics of mixed aetiology were given a new association word completion task to determine what factors cause variation among amnesics in the extent of such priming. As a group, the patients failed to show new association word completion although several individual amnesics had scores in the normal range. The extent of new association word completion correlated with word fluency as measured by the FAS test and with cued recall in the priming task. It correlated weakly with some measures of amnesic severity, but not with intelligence. Word completion unassisted by new associations did not correlate with any other variable.