The influence of age of acquisition on recall and recognition in Alzheimer’s patients and healthy ageing controls in Turkish

The current study set out to examine the influence of AoA on word recall and recognition tasks in 30 Alzheimer’s patients and 28 healthy ageing control group. Each participant was presented with 20 words from Raman, Raman and Mertan (2014) norms that critically varied on AoA. A subtest of WAIS-R (Weschler, 1981; adapted into Turkish, Yılmaz, 2000) was employed to establish the vocabulary capacity of participants together with the Mini-Mental State Examination (Folstein, Folstein, and McHugh, 1975). The pattern of results showed that healthy ageing adults outperformed Alzheimer’s patients in recall and recognition tasks and that overall early acquired words had an advantage over late acquired words. The results have implications for developing assessment tools and are discussed within the current theories of age of acquisition and the impact of the neurodegenerative loss of memory in Alzheimer's disease on lexicosemantic processing