Mild Cognitive Impairment: processing of emotional words.

Cognitive impairment and dementia are common in older people, generating distress in patients and their families, and high costs for society.

Communication disorders are a limitation for clinical and therapeutic management but also a marker of cognitive impairment, which contributes to the diagnosis and degree of severity of dementia.

The objective of the study is to compare the processing of emotional and non-emotional words in cognitive impairment.

The design incorporates a lexical decision task, in which one must decide between emotional words (positive and negative) and neutral words versus pseudowords.

The objective of the study is to compare the processing of emotional versus non-emotional words in people with and without cognitive impairment, in a lexical decision task.

It is expected that emotional words will have deeper processing than non-emotional words and, therefore, that reaction times and error rates will be lower to the extent that the level of emotion attributed to a word affects its retrieval in a lexical task.

Differences in emotional processing could exist between people with and without cognitive impairment, with lower performance for the second group.

Emotional words, aphasias, dementias.

Publication of an international indexed article

The results of the project may also be submitted for consideration to the scientific committee of the Annual Convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA).