Impact of auditory-visual bimodality on lexical retrieval in Alzheimer's disease patients.

The aim of this study was to generalize the positive impact of auditory-visual bimodality on lexical retrieval in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. In practice, the naming skills of healthy elderly persons improve when additional sensory signals are included. The hypothesis of this study was that the same influence would be observable in AD patients. Sixty elderly patients separated into three groups (healthy subjects, stage 1 AD patients, and stage 2 AD patients) were tested with a battery of naming tasks comprising three different modalities: a visual modality, an auditory modality, and a visual and auditory modality (bimodality). Our results reveal the positive influence of bimodality on the accuracy with which bimodal items are named (when compared with unimodal items) and their latency (when compared with unimodal auditory items). These results suggest that multisensory enrichment can improve lexical retrieval in AD patients.