BACKGROUND Semantic inhibition is often found to be impaired in Alzheimer´s disease (AD). The sentence completion task (Hayling test) was used to investigate whether it would be useful for differentiating mild AD from moderate AD. METHOD Latency responses and error scores in the automatic and inhibition parts of the test were registered in these two groups of patients and in a group of healthy older participants. The types of errors were also analysed. Group differences were analysed by ANOVA. In addition, relationships with other neuropsychological tests were reported. RESULTS Participants with moderate AD performed worse than controls in both the automatic and inhibition sections, whereas participants with mild AD exhibited impaired performance in the inhibition part, but not in the automatic part. Differences between the groups with mild and moderate AD appeared only in the error scores in the inhibition part, specifically type 3 errors. Error scores in the inhibition part correlated with performance in verbal fluency and working memory tests. CONCLUSIONS The Hayling task may be a useful tool for investigating control of inhibition in different stages of AD because different patterns of responses were observed.

中文翻译：

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阿尔茨海默氏病的语义抑制和痴呆严重程度。

背景技术在阿尔茨海默氏病（AD）中经常发现语义抑制作用减弱。句子完成任务（Hayling测试）用于调查将轻度AD与中度AD区分是否有用。方法在这两组患者和一组健康的老年受试者中记录了自动和抑制部分的潜伏期反应和错误评分。错误的类型也进行了分析。通过ANOVA分析组差异。此外，还报告了与其他神经心理学测试的关系。结果患有中度AD的参与者在自动和抑制部分的表现都比对照组差，而患有轻度AD的参与者在抑制部分而不是在自动部分表现出受损的表现。轻度和中度AD组之间的差异仅出现在抑制部分的错误评分中，特别是3型错误。抑制部分的错误评分与口语流利度和工作记忆测试的表现相关。结论Hayling任务可能是研究AD不同阶段抑制控制的有用工具，因为观察到了不同的反应模式。