Christine Dugas

ABSTRACT This study examined how semantic characteristics of verbal cues impact naming, focusing on cue distinctiveness, defined as the degree to which a semantic cue is uniquely associated with a target. Using a novel naming paradigm, we presented word pairs representing semantic features to elicit naming responses. These verbal cues were categorized as distinctive (e.g., “moo-milk” for COW) or shared (e.g., “feathers-pink” for FLAMINGO), and targets were classified as living or nonliving.

1 INTRODUCTION Word finding difficulty is a common complaint in older age and is often reported in a variety of neurologic diseases (Rohrer et al., 2008). Clinical evaluation using various tasks (e.g., confrontation naming, category fluency, phonemic fluency, and picture description) is used to confirm and to characterize verbal retrieval deficits. Mechanisms underlying these verbal retrieval deficits may vary across diseases, hence rendering a symptom-targeted therapy extremely challenging.

Christine Dugas, USA TODAY Published 12:33 a.m. ET Dec. 22, 2012 | Updated 8:25 a.m. ET Dec.