The effect of semantic and syntactic structure on verbal memory in Alzheimer's disease.

This study examined the ability of 17 patients with Alzheimer's disease and 17 normal-old subjects to recall short sentences that were normal, or had a disruption in either their semantic structure, their syntactic structure, or both their semantic and syntactic structure. Results showed that sentence recall performance was affected similarly in the demented and normal-old subjects by both the syntactic and semantic structure of the sentences. The presence of either type of language structure appeared to allow both normal and demented subjects to organize strings of words into multiword chunks for more efficient memory encoding.