The evidence on the language breakdown in dementia comes from predominantly English data. In my talk I will present the main findings of some behavioural and electrophysiological studies, the data of which come from Finnish-speaking subjects with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, or vascular dementia. In these studies, different aspects of language processing were assessed with several tasks, including concept- and attribute-definition tasks, naming and list-generation tasks, word-repetition and word-reading tasks, recognition tasks, as well as logico-grammatical tasks.

The data obtained from these studies confirm the earlier findings on English-speaking subjects that especially those language processes requiring the functioning of semantic memory are affected in different types and degrees of dementia.