The naming disorder of dementia of Alzheimer type.

We studied the characteristics of the naming disorder of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) in 20 patients, who were divided on the basis of Mini-Mental State scores into a mild and a moderate-severe group. Our results confirmed the presence of a progressive anomia which was sensitive both to word frequency and to image quality. Although DAT patients as a group made a similar proportion of perceptual-recognition and aphasic errors as did our age and education-matched controls, evidence was obtained that suggested that variations in the character of the anomia exist among individual DAT patients.