Word-word Relations in Dementia and Typical Aging

Natalia Arias-Trejo, Aline Minto-García, Diana I. Luna-Umanzor, Alma E. Ríos-Ponce, Balderas-Pliego Mariana, Gemma Bel-Enguix


Abstract
Older adults tend to suffer a decline in some of their cognitive capabilities, being language one of least affected processes. Word association norms (WAN) also known as free word associations reflect word-word relations, the participant reads or hears a word and is asked to write or say the first word that comes to mind. Free word associations show how the organization of semantic memory remains almost unchanged with age. We have performed a WAN task with very small samples of older adults with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), vascular dementia (VaD) and mixed dementia (MxD), and also with a control group of typical aging adults, matched by age, sex and education. All of them are native speakers of Mexican Spanish. The results show, as expected, that Alzheimer disease has a very important impact in lexical retrieval, unlike vascular and mixed dementia. This suggests that linguistic tests elaborated from WAN can be also used for detecting AD at early stages.
Anthology ID:
W18-4109
Volume:
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Language Cognition and Computational Models
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Manjira Sinha, Tirthankar Dasgupta
Venue:
LCCM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
85–93
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4109
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Natalia Arias-Trejo, Aline Minto-García, Diana I. Luna-Umanzor, Alma E. Ríos-Ponce, Balderas-Pliego Mariana, and Gemma Bel-Enguix. 2018. Word-word Relations in Dementia and Typical Aging. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Language Cognition and Computational Models, pages 85–93, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Word-word Relations in Dementia and Typical Aging (Arias-Trejo et al., LCCM 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4109.pdf