Laatu S, Portin R, Revonsuo A, Tuisku S, Rinne J
Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, Finland.
Cortex. 1997 Mar;33(1):27-45. doi: 10.1016/s0010-9452(97)80003-2.
The present study focuses on semantic deficits in Alzheimer's disease (AD). We distinguish three different levels of semantic knowledge: (1) lexical, (2) semantic-conceptual, (3) conscious understanding. We devised methods that tap levels (2) and (3). Our aim was to determine how much guidance AD patients need to consciously access a given semantic-conceptual field and how well they can understand the meanings of concepts and semantic relations. Four different tasks were used to tap different kinds of concepts, the relationships between concepts and their attributes, and the hierarchical structure among different concepts. The retrieval demands of the tasks were eased by presenting guiding questions. The results revealed that AD patients have deficient voluntary access to semantic-conceptual representations. The deficits persist even in passive recognition and forced-choice tasks. We conclude that AD patients have a generalized access deficit, although some aspects of the results are suggestive of storage deficit.
本研究聚焦于阿尔茨海默病（AD）中的语义缺陷。我们区分了语义知识的三个不同层次：（1）词汇层面，（2）语义概念层面，（3）意识理解层面。我们设计了能够探究（2）和（3）层次的方法。我们的目的是确定AD患者在有意识地获取给定语义概念领域时需要多少引导，以及他们对概念含义和语义关系的理解程度如何。使用了四项不同的任务来探究不同类型的概念、概念之间的关系及其属性，以及不同概念之间的层次结构。通过提出引导性问题减轻了任务的检索要求。结果显示，AD患者在自愿获取语义概念表征方面存在缺陷。这些缺陷甚至在被动识别和强制选择任务中依然存在。我们得出结论，AD患者存在普遍的获取缺陷，尽管结果的某些方面表明存在存储缺陷。
