The differential effects of semantic, acoustic, and nonverbal distraction on Korsakoff patients' verbal retention performance.

Korsakoff and alcoholic control patients' verbal retention performance was assessed following either acoustic, semantic, or nonverbal distractor activity. Both patient groups were similarly affected by the degree of relatedness between the distractor and the memoranda. Semantic distraction produced more verbal forgetting than acoustic, which in turn, caused more forgetting than the nonverbal tasks. The Korsakoff patients' verbal retention, however, became increasingly impaired, relative to the controls, as the level of similarity between the distraction and the memoranda increased. These results suggest that Korsakoff patients have difficulty performing verbal analyses which incorporated the distinctive physical, phonemic and semantic features of the memoranda into the development of their verbal memory traces.