Background: Communication is an important priority in dementia research. Communication strategies and scaffolds, specifically through augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), offer vital compensatory support for persons with dementia in an attempt to maintain the latter's quality of life and well-being through participation with others.…

Some scientists believe that speaking a second language could confer lasting cognitive advantages in aging and stave off the onset of dementia (Bialystok et al., 2007; Craik et al., 2010; Abutalebi & Rietbergen, 2014; Grant et al., 2014; Woumans et al., 2015; Klein et al., 2016; Abutalebi & Green, 2016; Smirnov et al., 2019). However, this…

Repetition priming (RP) has been employed as a measure of implicit processing in patients suffering from a breakdown of semantic memory, as in the case of semantic dementia (SD), a subtype of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). Here, we investigated face-name representation in a case of SD using a paradigm of within- and cross-domain…

Patients with semantic dementia show a specific pattern of impairment on both verbal and non-verbal "pre-semantic" tasks, e.g., reading aloud, past tense generation, spelling to dictation, lexical decision, object decision, colour decision and delayed picture copying. All seven tasks are characterised by poorer performance for items that are…

Previous neuropsychological studies on acquired dyslexia revealed a double dissociation in reading impairments. Patients with phonological dyslexia have selective difficulty in reading pseudo-words, while those with surface dyslexia misread exception words. This double dissociation in reading abilities has often been reported in brain-damaged…

Evidence from neurologically normal subjects suggests that repetition priming (RP) is independent of semantic processing. Therefore, we may expect patients with a selective deficit to conceptual knowledge to exhibit RP for words regardless of the integrity of their semantic representations. We tested six patients with semantic dementia (SD) on a…

Confrontation naming is impaired in neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and corticobasal degeneration (CBD). Some behavioural observations suggest a common source of impaired naming across these patient groups, while others find partially unique patterns of naming difficulty. We hypothesized…