El fenómeno de la punta de la lengua en el deterioro cognitivo leve. Un estudio piloto

The present study investigates naming of famous people in a group of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients (6 individuals) and a group of healthy controls (13 individuals) matched on age and educational level. The research is aimed at studying difficulties on semantic and phonological access to proper names in MCI patients. A task of naming from 60 famous persons pictures, included into a paradigm for facilitating tip-of-the-tongue events, was used. Results indicated that the MCI patients produced more positive TOT, more errors and resolved fewer TOT than the healthy controls. Semantic information was more diffuse in MCI patients than in healthy controls. We suggest that MCI affects negatively activation of the semantic representations of proper names and weakens transmission from the semantic to the phonological representations.