Semantic Processing Ability in Persian-Speaking Alzheimer’s Patients

Objectives: This paper aims to explore whether the Persian-speaking patients of different stages, ranging from mild to moderate, have a deficit in semantic processing by comparing the performance of Alzheimer’s patients with that of the healthy individuals. Methods: The subjects of both the groups of Alzheimer’s patients and healthy control were matched for age, the state of monolingual or bilingual, and socio-cultural status. In order to assess the semantic processing ability of the subjects, Pekkala’s 2004 model was adopted. According to the model, the subjects were required to produce (say) the name of as many as category members of animals as possible within the time limit of 60 seconds. Results: The findings showed that while healthy subjects had an intact semantic processing ability, the AD patients showed weak performance in the five measures of semantic fluency including the number of true linguistic units, the total quantity of words, word size in clusters, the mean cluster size, and the cluster switching.  Discussion: Conclusion: Following the framework of Troyer (1998b), it has been concluded that AD patients suffer from the semantic processing.