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Lexical agraphia in Alzheimer's disease
S Z Rapcsak1, S A Arthur, D A Bliklen
1Department of Neurology, University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, Tucson 85724.
Archives of Neurology
|January 1, 1989
Summary
Patients with Alzheimer's disease show impaired spelling of irregular words, indicating damage to their lexical spelling system. Phonological spelling abilities remain largely unaffected in these patients.
Area of Science:
- Neurology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
Background:
- Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder.
- Spelling impairments (agraphia) can manifest in various forms.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate spelling patterns in patients with senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT).
- To identify specific linguistic deficits related to spelling in SDAT.
Main Methods:
- Compared spelling performance of 11 SDAT patients with normal controls.
- Analyzed performance on regular words, irregular words, and nonwords.
Main Results:
- SDAT patients performed similarly to controls on regular words and nonwords.
- SDAT patients showed significantly worse performance on irregular words compared to controls.
- This pattern suggests a specific impairment in lexical spelling.
Conclusions:
- Findings indicate lexical agraphia in SDAT, likely due to loss or impaired access to orthographic lexicon representations.
- Phonological spelling (phoneme-grapheme conversion) appears to be relatively preserved.