Biomedical subjects

N Biassou

Publications and source records attributed to N Biassou.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1998

Semantic memory in Alzheimer's disease: representativeness, ontologic category, and material.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients with semantic memory difficulty and AD patients with relatively preserved semantic memory named pictures and judged the category membership of words and pictures of natural kinds and manufactured artifacts that varied in their representativeness. Only semantically impaired patients were insensitive to representativeness in their category judgments. AD subgroup judgments did not differ for natural kinds compared to manufactured artifacts nor for words compared to pictures. AD subgroup differences could not be explained by dementia severity, memory, reading, and visuoperception. The similarity process for relating coordinate members of a taxonomic category contributes to the normal appreciation of word and picture meaning, and this process is compromised in AD patients with semantic difficulty.

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PubMed1997

Dual processing of open- and closed-class words.

A series of articles in the past two decades has suggested differential processing of open- and closed-class lexical items by normal adults. Difficulties in replicating a crucial study (Bradley, 1978), however, have weakened the dual route hypothesis. We matched 16 French open-class items to 16 closed-class items for phonological structure, world length, and relative word frequency. Three agrammatic aphasics revealed strikingly more phonological errors on closed-class than open-class items. Dysfluencies were greater on closed-class items and contributed to greater overall reading time for the closed-class words, consistent with a two-route model for the production of closed- and open-class lexical items in Broca's aphasics and, thus, normals.

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PubMed1996

Language comprehension profiles in Alzheimer's disease, multi-infarct dementia, and frontotemporal degeneration.

We assessed language functioning in 116 age-, education-, and severity-matched patients with the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD), multi-infarct dementia (MID) due to small-vessel ischemic disease, or a frontotemporal form of degeneration (FD). Assessments of comprehension revealed that patients with AD are significantly impaired in their judgments of single word and picture meaning, whereas patients with FD had sentence comprehension difficulty due to impaired processing of grammatical phrase structure. Patients with MID did not differ from control subjects in their comprehension performance. Traditional aphasiologic measures did not distinguish between AD, MID, and FD. Selective patterns of comprehension difficulty in patients with different forms of dementia emphasize that language deficits cannot be explained entirely by the compromised memory associated with a progressive neurodegenerative illness.

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PubMed1995

Phonologic processing deficits in Alzheimer's disease.

We investigated phonologic production in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) on a repetition task. AD patients produced significantly more speech errors than age-matched controls. AD patients' errors, unlike those of controls, resulted in the transformation of real words into pseudowords, occurred disproportionately in word-initial positions, and were not influenced by the phonologic environment. This pattern of errors suggests a lexical phonologic retrieval deficit in AD.

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