Zannino Gian Daniele, Perri Roberta, Teghil Alice, Caltagirone Carlo, Carlesimo Giovanni A
Laboratory of Clinical and Behavioral Neurology, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy.
Department of Psychology, University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2018 Jan 9;11:261. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00261. eCollection 2017.
We aimed to address the long-standing issue of the nature of the relationships that link a cue word to words associated with it. In keeping with a recently proposed neuropsychological model of semantic memory (Zannino et al., 2015), we provide support for the hypothesis that associative links are semantic in nature and not lexical. In support of this hypothesis, we demonstrate a relationship in healthy subjects between the probability of producing word X in response to cue word Y in a free association task and the probability of using word X to describe the meaning of word Y. Furthermore, we provide evidence that associative measures are altered in people suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and predict their level of performance in a picture-naming task. We provide a parsimonious account of the experimental data gathered form these different sources of evidence according to the hypothesis that the links between a cue word and its associates can be viewed as binding a concept (the cue) to pieces of information regarding its meaning (the associates).
我们旨在解决一个长期存在的问题，即连接提示词与其相关词汇的关系的本质。根据最近提出的语义记忆神经心理学模型（赞尼诺等人，2015年），我们为以下假设提供了支持：联想链接本质上是语义性的，而非词汇性的。为支持这一假设，我们在健康受试者中证明了在自由联想任务中对提示词Y做出反应而产生单词X的概率与使用单词X描述单词Y含义的概率之间存在关联。此外，我们提供证据表明，患阿尔茨海默病（AD）的人的联想测量结果发生了改变，并能预测他们在图片命名任务中的表现水平。根据提示词与其关联词汇之间的链接可被视为将一个概念（提示词）与关于其含义的信息片段（关联词汇）绑定在一起的假设，我们对从这些不同证据来源收集的实验数据进行了简洁的描述。
