ABSTRACT
A reasonable assumption, in a degraded semantic system, is that factors such as word frequency, concept familiarity and typicality would be predictors of performance. Common vocabulary such as ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ should be better retained than less common vocabulary such as ‘penguin’ and ‘leopard’. In both KE and WM, the semantic disorder extended beyond the verbal domain. They had difficulties recognizing pictures of famous people and famous buildings, sorting pictures of dogs, cats, birds and fish into the relevant category, separating real fruits and vegetables according to the context in which they would be eaten and matching tastes of fruit juices with the appropriate fruit. A fundamental general point was the demonstration of the interdependence between experiential and semantic memory. The implication was that semantic knowledge of words and objects, once acquired, represents an essentially stable knowledge base that is independent of autobiographical experience.
