El-La: The impact of degraded semantic representations on knowledge of grammatical gender in semantic dementia

LAMBON RALPH, M.; ; SAGE, K.;; GREEN HEREDIA, C.; ; BERTHIER, M. L.; MARTINEZ CUITIÑO, M. ; TORRALVA, T ; MANES, F. ; PATTERSON, K

Acta Neuropsychologica

Acta Neuropsychologica

Año: 2011 vol. 9 p. 115 - 131

1730-7503

Previous research on semantic dementia (SD) has demonstrated a necessary link between conceptual representations and ability on a range of non-semantic tasks, both verbal and nonverbal. In all cases, SD patients exhibit good performance on items that conform to the underlying statistical surface structure of the domain in question but poor performance on items that are atypical with respect to these statistics. For such items, there is a strong tendency for the patients errorful responses to reflect the more typical pattern. To date, most research on this topic has been conducted with English-speaking patients and where it has been extended to non-English languages, directly comparable aspects of each language have been probed. In this study we tested the generalization of this theory by probing performance on an aspect of Spanish for which there is no analogue in English (grammatical gender). As predicted, Spanish SD patients were able to provide the correct gender to high frequency words or where the phonology of the noun strongly predicted the grammatical gender. For low frequency, atypical nouns, however, the patients made a much greater rate of errors (preferring the statistically typical gender). As expected, performance on nouns with atypical grammatical gender was strongly correlated with the degree of semantic impairment across the case series of SD patients. The results not only provide another example of the critical relationship between semantic memory and non-semantic cognition, but also indicate that this theoretical framework generalizes to novel aspects of non-English languages suggesting that the phenomenon is based on brain-general mechanisms.