Lexical Priming by Music in Alzheimer's Disease and Healthy Aging

Lexical Priming by Music in Alzheimer's Disease and Healthy Aging

While verbal memory is quickly reached in the wake of Alzheimer's disease, the musical memory remains preserved until a late stage of the disease. This observation encouraged the development of music-based therapies in the management of neurocognitive and behavioral disorders that characterize Alzheimer's disease. In order to develop rehabilitation programs that effectively target cognitive functions to stimulate, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms underlying this beneficial effect of music on cognition.

The investigators study the stimulation by the song, material integrating language and music, and having an autobiographical value. The investigators measure the lexical priming capacity of the song, that is, its ability to activate and maintain lexical and semantic representations, which are threatened with alteration in the course of the disease.

This lexical priming effect by song is measured in patients with mild Alzheimer's disease and healthy volunteers during a single test session. In the first phase of the session, participants are exposed to familiar songs, presented in sung, spoken or instrumental form, whose popularity they evaluate. In the second phase, they perform two implicit memory tasks: a trigram completion task and a lexical decision task. These tests measure the facilitation of the processing of words evoked by songs in relation to words unrelated to songs, reflecting a "long-term" memory update of mnemic traces of primed words.

Inclusion Criteria for patients :

• Presence of diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer's disease
• Age ≥ 65 years
• MMSE (Mini-mental state Examination) ≥ 20

Exclusion Criteria for patient :

• Unstable clinical presentation or language presentation in the foreground
• Cognitive disorder of etiology different from that of Alzheimer's disease

Inclusion Criteria for volunteers :

• Age ≥ 18 years
• Absence of neurological or psychiatric antecedents
• For those aged 65 or over: MMSE (Mini-mental state Examination) greater than or equal to 27; non-pathological performance against the 5 words of Dubois and the verbal fluency test.

Exclusion Criteria for volunteers :

• Visual or auditory disorders insufficiently corrected
• Oral or written expression in French insufficient to carry out tests
• Consumption of psychotropic drugs not stabilized