he Mental Lexicon 2:2 (2007), 25c–26c. issn 1871–1340 / e-issn 1871–1375 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Naming compounds in Alzheimer’s disease Valentina Chiarelli, Alina Menichelli and Carlo Semenza Department of Psychology, University of Trieste, Italy he peculiar pattern of linguistic and cognitive deficits in early Alzheimer’s dis- ease (DAT), whereby memory limitations and failure in semantics prevail over deficits in syntax, makes an interesting contrast with linguistic deficits in classic aphasia categories. he present study compared errors in picture naming of dif- ferent types of Italian compounds, both in aphasia and in DAT. As in previous studies, in aphasia the knowledge of the compound status seems to be retained vis-à-vis the inability to retrieve the phonological form. his effect is much less evident in DAT. he target compound structure in errors is also preserved in aphasia, while DAT participants seem to compensate for their retrieval failure by overwhelmingly using the most productive structures. Unlike in aphasia, in DAT the retrieval of the second component is more difficult than the retrieval of the first component, probably as an effect of processing overload. Keywords: compounds, naming, lexical access, aphasia, Alzheimer’s disease, morphology “Compound words are structures at the crossroads between words and sentences re- flecting both the properties of linguistic representation in the mind and grammatical processing: as such, they offer us a unique opportunity to understand the interplay between storage and computation in the mind, the manner in which morphologi- cal and semantic factors impact the nature of storage and the manner in which the computational processes serve the demands of on-line language comprehension and production” (Libben, 2006, p. 3). hese facts make of compounds an extremely interesting domain for neurolinguistic research and, indeed, recent investigations in aphasia (see Semenza & Mondini, 2006, for a throughout review) were able to collect important pieces of information on both the representation and the pro- cessing of compounds. he main findings can be summarized as follows: a. he knowledge of the compound status of a phonological form, that of the com- pound structure with respect to the position of the components, and that of word building rules have been demonstrated to be independent from the knowledge of