Proper Names Retrieval in People with Alzheimer’s Dementia

A Pilot Study

Abstract

Difficulty in proper names retrieval is a frequent complaint in ageing and early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). The main aim of this study is to analyze the capacity to retrieve proper names in elderly people with preserved cognition (PC) and with AD. Furthermore, this study intends to examine the effect of intrinsic characteristics of the stimuli used on the performance of these individuals in a retrieval task of proper names, and to distinguish the contribution of semantic and phonological cues in their retrieval. For this purpose, twelve elderly people of both sexes with an average age of 78.66 years (SD=7.72) were distributed in two groups: with AD and with PC. All of them carried out a task of naming faces of famous people with and without clues, both semantic and phonological. The results indicate that individuals with AD significantly showed a lower performance in retrieving proper names than individuals with PC. Besides, the results show that there were significant differences in the number of correct and “don’t know” answers between both groups. On the other hand, phonological cues were more useful than semantic ones to achieve the denomination in the two groups. Finally, the number of correct answers differed according to nationality, epoch, and socio-professional environment of the participants. Specifically, individuals correctly named more Spanish characters than foreigners, more characters from older decades than from more current ones, and more characters from the entertainment field than from the other fields that were investigated.