Abstract: Category-specific semantic deficits, that is, selective or disproportionate impairment for one semantic category compared to other semantic categories, can occur in brain-damaged patients. It has been shown that category-specific semantic deficits in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) could be due to differences between items of different categories in familiarity, word frequency, age of acquisition, visual complexity, semantic distance, processing demands, and types of semantic features being involved. However, it is still not clear whether the category-specific semantic deficits in these people are also due to the category of living/non-living itself. Future studies need to integrate the category-based and feature-based approach and to differentiate between the storage and access of semantic memory. In addition, the seriousness of AD needs to be taken into account when addressing how AD disrupts semantic memory.

Key words: Alzheimer’s disease, semantic memory, category specificity, semantic features, semantic priming