Errors of free recall in senile dementia.

Errors made in the free recall of nouns by patients with senile dementia were classified as to their paradigmatic, phonological, or syntagmatic relationships with presented words. Dementia patients at four levels of dementia severity made relatively more paradigmatic errors than normals. Syntagmatic errors only occurred for greater severity. Such errors show the relative preservation in dementia of semantic knowledge about words as well as the decreased paradigmatic and syntagmatic discriminability of words.