STEM-, SPRAAK- EN TAALPATHOLOGIE Vol. 18, No. S01, 2013, pp. 132-135 32.8310/S01/1813-132 c  Groningen University Press Processing pseudo-words in mild cognitive impairment: On-line and off-line evidence from Slovenian Christina Manouilidou 1 , Barbara Dolenc 2 , Tatjana Marvin 3 , Katarina Marjanoviˇ c 3 & Zvezdan Pirtošek 2 1 University of Patras, Greece 2 University Medical Centre, Ljubljana, Slovenia 3 University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Introduction The term Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) refers to a condition between normal aging and dementia which is often seen as prodromal for dementia (Chertkow, 2002). When MCI individuals demonstrate impairments in other-than-memory domains, including language, they are more likely to develop dementia than are those with a pure memory impairment (Petersen, 2003). Thus, understanding the nature of language impairment and possibly identifying sensitive measures of linguistic impairment constitutes a vital tool in early detection of dementia. While there exists plentiful evidence of language deficits in MCI mainly from standardized assessment tools (for a review see Taler & Phillips, 2008), psycholinguistic studies of language processing are scarce. The few studies that have employed psycholinguistic methodology have revealed disturbances in performance mainly at the lexical-semantic level (Olichney et al, 2002; Puregger et al, 2003; Davie et al, 2004; Taler & Jarema, 2004; 2006; Duong et al, 2006) reflecting an impaired semantic network in this population. At the same time, structural aspects of language, namely phonological and morphological structure as well as syntax are thought to show no alterations. One important dimension of previous research is that, with few exceptions, most studies have employed off-line measurements, thus, only targeting “controlled” and not automatic processing. In this context, the present study examines aspects of both controlled and automatic lexical processing in MCI patients by looking at their performance in differentiating pseudo-words which appear to have different patterns of violability. The goal of the study is to present data regarding the boundaries of lexical representations and their decay in this population, thus contributing to the establishment of the nature of linguistic deficits seen in MCI. Moreover, by employing both off-line and on-line chronometrized tasks we attempt to detect differences between MCI and healthy populations in more subtle aspects of pseudo-word processing.