摘要：Semantic dementia (SD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by deterioration of semanticmemory (Snowden et al., 1987). Patients with SD have difficulties with expressive and receptive vocabulary and thesemantic meaning of the words. As the disease progresses, concepts and associations appear to dissipate and lexicalboundaries to erode. At the extreme, comprehension is altogether lacking and residual utterances are bereft ofmeaning. Given that lexical knowledge includes a variety of information (phonological, morphological, syntactic,semantic) which is supposed to be encoded in the mental representation of words, the aim of the present on-goingstudy is to delineate the aspects of word knowledge that are primarily affected and lead to its total loss. In otherwords, we seek to tap into aspects of lexical representation (phonological, semantic, stmctural) that are more likelyaffected at initial stages. We devised a paradigm based on Manouilidou (2007) including various types ofpseudowords violating stmctural or semantic constraints of Greek word formation rules.
