Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Numerous studies have found category-specific semantic deficits in Alzheimers disease (AD). Thus far, however, only asmall number of studies have investigated how semantic categories lexicalized by verbs are represented, and how thesecategories might be impaired in AD. We investigated the representation and breakdown of verb knowledge employingdifferent syntactic and semantic classes of verbs in a group of probable AD patients (N=10) and matched controls. Inour main task, we employed movies of events and states depicting verbs belonging to three different classes: causatives,perception/psychological, and movement verbs. These verbs differ with regards to their argument structure, the thematicroles they assign, and their hypothetical semantic templates. Patients had more difficult employing verbs of the percep-tion/psychological class. We suggest that thematic roles play the most important role in verb semantic representations. Wefurther suggest that verbs are not represented by decompositional semantic templates.