These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: Knowledge of New English vocabulary in amnesia: an examination of premorbidly acquired semantic memory.
    Author: Verfaellie M, Reiss L, Roth HL.
    Journal: J Int Neuropsychol Soc; 1995 Sep; 1(5):443-53. PubMed ID: 9375230.
    Abstract:
    To assess if amnesics have intact remote memory for general semantic information, we examined memory for vocabulary words with known dates of entry into the language between 1955 and 1989. Amnesics of mixed etiology with acute onset performed normally on both a recall and a recognition task. Korsakoff patients, in contrast, were impaired on both tasks and demonstrated a gradient such that their knowledge of words acquired during more recent time periods was worse than that of words acquired during more remote time periods. The improvement in performance associated with recognition testing was larger for Korsakoff patients than for control subjects and correlated significantly with a composite measure of frontal dysfunction. These findings suggest a deficit in the controlled search and retrieval of semantic information in Korsakoff patients. The implications of the differential performance of Korsakoff and mixed etiology amnesics for explanations of temporally graded retrograde amnesia are discussed.
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]