Effects of age of acquisition, word frequency, and familiarity on object recognition and naming in dementia.

116 patients with established dementia completed a short confrontation naming test. Naming latency correlated -.69 (Kendall tau, p < .001) with general frequency of the name of the object. Recognition failure correlated .53 with age of acquisition of the name and -.58 with familiarity of the object. These and other correlations are not in accord with recent findings from studies of normal people. More extensive studies of these relationships in dementia, where disorders of recognition and naming are common, would be informative.