Word-stem completion task to investigate semantic network in patients with Alzheimer's disease

Semantic impairment in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is revealed by tasks of verbal naming, verbal fluency, and semantic knowledge. Causes of the deficit remain unclear in spite of many studies to investigate whether AD patients suffer from the inability to have voluntary access to an almost intact semantic store or from its break down. Word-stem completion (WSC) tasks have been utilized in healthy subjects in order to study semantic memory and network by exploiting the possibility of the involuntary access to them. Available conflicting data refer to the presence of semantic prime in AD patients. To explore the semantic network in AD, patients were requested to complete with the first word that sprang to their mind a stem submitted immediately after presentation of the word prime, as a WSC task. Stems consisted of the three beginning letters of words that were semantically related to primes. We compared data obtained with this task from patients with mild to moderate AD with those from normal controls (NC). AD patients completed less stems (P < 0.001) with the expected words than NC, suggesting a break down of the semantic network rather than a deficit in the access to the semantic store.