Biasing of alcoholic Korsakoff patients' semantic memory

The extent to which the spelling of ambiguous words could be biased and the length of time this biasing could be maintained were investigated in three studies. Biasing occurred for amnesic Korsakoff patients but the effect was consistently more fragile than the biasing pattern of alcoholic control patients. Between-group differences were due to the differential dependency of amnesics' biasing upon the activation of semantic memory. The spelling bias of the alcoholic control patients appeared to be based on both semantic activation and episodic retention.