ABSTRACT
Several studies have reported specific semantic dissociations in brain damaged patients. These semantic dissociations concern particularly the impairment of one domain of knowledge (living concepts) whilst the other is relatively spared (nonliving concepts). The origin of these dissociations remain controversial. A important number of semantic theories have advanced different explanations for this phenomenon. Among others we include: the sensory-functional theory (Warrington & McCarthy, 1983), the organized content hypothesis, the domain specific hypothesis (Caramazza & Shelton, 1998) and the conceptual structure account (Moss, Tyler, & Devlin, 2002). However, at first time some authors have suggested that category-specific semantic deficit for living things may be due to a lower familiarity and frequency and a more visual complexity of these concepts compared with nonliving concepts (Funnell & Sheridan, 1992). In addition, recently researches suggest that familiarity varies according to the gender and therefore it may to influence the emergence of category-specific semantic deficits. Thus, Laiacona, Barbarotto and Capitani (1998) showed that females with Alzheimer's disease were more impaired with nonliving categories, whereas males patients showed more deficit with living categories. Likewise, studies from normal subjects have shown a gender-category interaction in a semantic fluency task, females performed better with fruits and males with tools (Capitani, Laiacona, & Barbarotto, 1999). The goals of this study are a) to evaluate the familiarity of concepts according to domains (living and nonliving) and categories and b) to explore the gender effect on familiarity ratings.
