Reply To: “Brain storms” by Jon Palfreman (Year 2)

[Anonymous]

A mental dictionary is a psycholinguistic construct that is supposed to answer the question how words are activated or stored by each speaker. It develops when we learn new words and changes when we suffer from, e.g. Alzheimer’s disease (problems with recalling, retrieving words). This construct is connected with memory, attention, e.c. My research is about evoking associations to given words. For example, I ask my patient to find as many associations to the word ‘doctor’ as he/she can. The control (healthy) group usually name lots of comprehensive words (hospital, university, medicine, dr House…). Patients with P.D. can name less fewer words, usually connected only with their personal experiences (eg. ‘my friend was a doctor, he had gray hair, he died last year’). So, their mental dictionary is probably affected by their illness.

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