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

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.