Word Generation from Letter and Semantic Categories Across the Alzheimer’s Disease Spectrum

Individuals with mild dementia or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) often have verbal fluency deficits with greater impairment in generating exemplars from a semantic category (e.g., “animals”) than words that begin with a particular letter (e.g., ‘F’). This may reflect early development of pathology in cortical regions mediating semantic knowledge/organization required to efficiently generate words from a conceptually‐related set of exemplars. We sought to determine if this word generation deficit and discrepancy between category and letter fluency emerges in the preclinical stage of AD.