@inproceedings{arias-trejo-etal-2018-word,
    title = "Word-word Relations in Dementia and Typical Aging",
    author = "Arias-Trejo, Natalia  and
      Minto-Garc{\'\i}a, Aline  and
      Luna-Umanzor, Diana I.  and
      R{\'\i}os-Ponce, Alma E.  and
      Mariana, Balderas-Pliego  and
      Bel-Enguix, Gemma",
    editor = "Sinha, Manjira  and
      Dasgupta, Tirthankar",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Language Cognition and Computational Models",
    month = aug,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/W18-4109",
    pages = "85--93",
    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.",
}