[Description of a novel test for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease]. / Descripción de un nuevo test para la detección precoz de la enfermedad de Alzheimer.

INTRODUCTION: Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease (AD) as soon as possible is critical to achieve an effective treatment of patients. AIM: To make up a test capable of differentiating those patients suffering from the early stages of AD compared to healthy people or patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). SUBJECTS AND METHODS: A test with 10 memory and language tasks was applied to 85 people: 34 in the early stage of probable AD, 26 with MCI, and 25 healthy people. The groups did not differ with regard to age, sex or studies. RESULTS: The analysis of variance showed significative differences between groups in all tasks as well as in the global score. Sensibility and specificity were calculated to MCI and AD. CONCLUSIONS: We designed a new test to detect AD patients on an early stage that is quick and easy to apply. The preliminary scale results in controls, MCI and early AD are shown.

[Disassociation between agrammatic and anomic patients in their production of verb forms]. / Disociación entre pacientes agramáticos y anómicos en la producción de formas verbales.

INTRODUCTION: Electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies suggest that regular and irregular verbs are differently represented in the brain. Findings from studies of patients seem to agree with this view, but there are discordant data. AIM: To test if there is a dissociation in regular and irregular verb processing between patients with anterior lesions, characterized as Broca's aphasics, and patients with posterior lesions, characterized as anomics. PATIENTS AND METHODS: 10 aphasic patients participated in the study: five presenting evidence of Broca's aphasia and five presenting evidence of anomia. The task required patients to complete 58 sentences with a verb conjugated in the past tense form. 29 sentences required an irregular verb and 29 required a regular verb. RESULTS: Statistical analyses indicate a main effect due to differences between the different types of patients, and an interaction between this effect of patient type and the effect of verb type. The interaction was due to the fact that anomic patients had more difficulty in completing sentences using irregular verbs. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study support a dual route model, which assumes that regular verbs are processed by application of morphological rules whereas irregular verbs are processed through the addressed recovery of conjugated forms.

[Dissociation of conceptual and linguistic information based on a case study]. / Disociación de la información conceptual y lingüística a partir de un estudio de caso.

INTRODUCTION: Grouping the stimuli that we perceive in abstract categories is basic to understand our surroundings. Research gathered in the last few years with neuroimage techniques and brain damaged patients shows the role of the left temporal area in the organization of the semantic categories. CASE REPORT: A young aphasic patient study is reported who, after a cerebral haemorrhagia in the left temporo-parieto-occipital area, shows significant semantic difficulties. The results of this woman in several linguistic and semantic tasks indicate that her difficulties are conceptual rather than linguistics, since she makes well any task that does not demand access to the meaning of the words, but she fails in those tasks which require to understand the concepts. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this patient show the key role that the left temporal area has in the organization of the semantic categories. As consequence of the injury in that zone, the patient shows an organization of the stimuli based more in associative criteria than taxonomic and guided by the experience and functional adaptation the daily routine.

[Why do the aphasic patients produce semantic errors?]. / ¿Por qué cometen errores semánticos los pacientes afásicos?

INTRODUCTION: One of the most striking and surprising symptoms of the aphasic patients is the production of semantic errors. This kind of errors, which consists of replacing a word by another with a different but similar meaning, may appear when speaking, as it happens when a patient say dog in reference to a cat (semantic paraphasia), when reading as it happens when a patient reads dog where is writing cat (semantic paralexia), as well as in repetition or in writing. DEVELOPMENT: Some patients make these errors only in a specific linguistic modality (deep dyslexic patients make semantic errors in reading, deep dysphasic patients in repetition, etc.), but some patients make semantic errors in several modalities or even in all of them. Why these differences and what are the causes of these errors? Nowadays, models of linguistic processing built up from experiments with normal subjects provide us an answer to most of the above questions. From these models, by using appropriate tasks, it is possible to examine the reasons because of a patient makes certain errors. In fact, the results in different tasks help us to locate the deficit of each patient more than errors per se. It has been shown that sometimes the same type of error (e.g. a semantic paraphasia) can be caused by different processes in different patients. In this paper we will try to analyze which are the cognitive processes underlying semantic errors in each of the linguistic activities, when such processes are altered by injury, as well as to determine the best procedures to know what mechanisms are generating semantic errors in each aphasic patient.

[Repetition of pseudo-words in Spanish children with specific language disorder: a psycholinguistic marker]. / Repetición de pseudopalabras en niños españoles con trastorno específico del lenguaje: marcador psicolingüístico.

AIMS: To analyze whether repetition of nonwords (NWR) is a good method to differentiate between Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI), children with normal language development (NL), and children with articulation disorder (AD), and to study whether phonological and syllabical characteristics, which are present in nonwords used in this task, are compatible with a SLI explanation on the basis of the temporal auditory limitation. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Eighteen 5- and 6-year-old children with NL, 19 with SLI, and 19 with AD, performed verbal tasks (principally, lexical and verbal memory tasks), and two NWR tasks: one is formed by four nonwords series with frequent syllables, in accordance with the analysis of syllable frequency in Spanish, and the other task is formed by nonwords with infrequent syllables. RESULTS: Like in English, NWR is the best method to differentiate children with SLI and children with NL; yet children with a minor impairment, like AD, show deficits in this task. Therefore, this disorder could be considered as an 'intermediate zone' between NL and SLI. Then it seems that AD is not an unmixed impairment of production only, since in its origin there are difficulties linked with the formation of the phonological representations of the words. CONCLUSIONS: With regard to syllable frequency, results do not support the explanation on the basis of temporal auditory limitation in Spanish. Results are discussed in relation to other explanations: general limitation of processing, with special incidence of the phonological working memory, and connectionist perspectives.