Objects and properties: a study of the breakdown of semantic memory

This paper reports a study of the breakdown of semantic memory in the case of a subject with semantic dementia. The first experiment shows that the subject failed to comprehend words of low familiarity and word frequency, even though the spoken word forms were recognised as familiar. Experiments 2 and 3 showed (a) that the recall of word meanings in definition tasks did not vary with the generality of the word meaning (e.g. category, basic level, or subordinate property) but varied instead with the concept familiarity and frequency of the name; (b) that the ability to verify properties of basic-level objects was not affected by the ability to comprehend the property name, but depended instead on the degree of knowledge demonstrated for the object name in definition tasks; (c) that properties were frequently verified correctly when the object had been defined only to the superordinate level. It is argued that the results do not support the widely held view that, in general, specific information is lost first when semantic memory breaks down. The selective failure to recall specific information for some word meanings is discussed with reference to two theoretical accounts.