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01-06-2013 | Original Article

An Italian battery for the assessment of semantic memory disorders

Authors: Eleonora Catricalà, Pasquale A. Della Rosa, Valeria Ginex, Zoe Mussetti, Valentina Plebani, Stefano F. Cappa

Published in: Neurological Sciences | Issue 6/2013

Abstract

We report the construction and standardization of a new comprehensive battery of tests for the assessment of semantic memory disorders. The battery is constructed on a common set of 48 stimuli, belonging to both living and non-living categories, rigidly controlled for several confounding variables, and is based on an empirically derived corpus of semantic features. It includes six tasks, in order to assess semantic memory through different modalities of input and output: two naming tasks, one with colored pictures and the other in response to an oral description, a word-picture matching task, a picture sorting task, a free generation of features task and a sentence verification task. Normative data on 106 Italian subjects pooled across homogenous subgroups for age, sex and education are reported. The new battery allows an in-depth investigation of category-specific disorders and of progressive semantic memory deficits at features level, overcoming some of the limitations of existing tests.

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Title: An Italian battery for the assessment of semantic memory disorders
Authors: Eleonora Catricalà
Pasquale A. Della Rosa
Valeria Ginex
Zoe Mussetti
Valentina Plebani
Stefano F. Cappa
Publication date: 01-06-2013
Publisher: Springer Milan
Published in: Neurological Sciences / Issue 6/2013
Print ISSN: 1590-1874
Electronic ISSN: 1590-3478
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-012-1181-z

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An Italian battery for the assessment of semantic memory disorders

Abstract

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Abstract

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