Journal
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
Volume 23, Issue 4, Pages 492-499Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/a0015452
Keywords
semantic dementia; imageability; concreteness; anterior temporal; synonym judgment
Categories
Funding
- NIMH [MH64445]
- RCUK fellowship
- MRC programme grant [G0501632]
- Medical Research Council [G0501632] Funding Source: researchfish
- MRC [G0501632] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The vast majority of brain-injured patients with semantic impairment have better comprehension of concrete than abstract words. In contrast, several patients with semantic dementia (SD), who show circumscribed atrophy of the anterior temporal lobes bilaterally. have been reported to show reverse imageability effects. that is. relative preservation of abstract knowledge. Although these reports largely concern individual patients, some researchers have recently proposed that superior comprehension of abstract concepts is a characteristic feature of SD. This would imply that the anterior temporal lobes are particularly crucial for processing sensory aspects of semantic knowledge, which are associated with concrete not abstract concepts. However, functional neuroimaging studies of healthy participants do not unequivocally predict reverse imageability effects in SD because the temporal poles sometimes show greater activation for more abstract concepts. The authors examined a case-series of 11 SD patients on a synonym judgment test that orthogonally varied the frequency and imageability of the items. All patients had higher success rates for more imageable as well as more frequent words, Suggesting that (1) the anterior temporal lobes underpin semantic knowledge for both concrete and abstract concepts, (2) more imageable items-perhaps because of their richer multimodal representations-are typically more robust in the face of global semantic degradation and (3) reverse imageability effects are not a characteristic feature of SD.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available