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An Italian battery for the assessment of semantic memory disorders

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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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Acknowledgments

We thank Chiara Dominici for her help in the collection of features norms and Sheila Sernoff for her help with the revision of the English text. This study was supported by a European Union (FT6-2004-NEST-PATH) Grant (028714) to S.F.C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Neuroscience, San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, via Olgettina 58, 20132, Milan, Italy

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

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  1. Eleonora Catricalà
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  2. Pasquale A. Della Rosa
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  3. Valeria Ginex
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  6. Stefano F. Cappa
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Correspondence to Eleonora Catricalà.

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Catricalà, E., Della Rosa, P.A., Ginex, V. et al. An Italian battery for the assessment of semantic memory disorders. Neurol Sci 34, 985–993 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-012-1181-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-012-1181-z

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