The semantic deficit in dementia: Connectionist approaches to what goes wrong in picture naming

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This paper addresses two main issues. First, what is the focus (or foci) of the naming deficit in patients with probable Alzheimer's disease? Secondly, how is semantic memory degraded by dementia? This paper will attempt to answer these questions by emphasizing connectionist modelling of semantic and neuropsychological processes. It will be argued that the loss of semantic microfeatures leads to the observed pattern of performance on naming and semantic memory tasks in dementia. These microfeatures may not represent linguistically simple lexical concepts or attributes, but are components of semantic representations that are relatively It is hypothesized that word meanings are equivalent to semantic attractors across these microfeatures. It is a central theme of this paper that connectionist modelling reveals how apparently disparate phenomena may in fact be related.