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Though central to dementia assessments, verbal fluency tasks are suboptimally exploited. Performance is typically measured by counting valid responses. This precludes insights on which word types are least accessible to patients, while failing to discriminate among disorders. Alternatively, each word can be decomposed into relevant properties that drive semantic memory retrievability. Recently, our team has combined objective lexical measures with multimodal imaging to examine whether this approach is sensitive to Hispanics with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), vis‐à‐vis others with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD).

In Experiment‐1, we recruited 32 AD patients and 32 bvFTD patients, matched with 27 HCs. Experiment‐2 involved 60 persons with MCI and 60 matched HCs. Participants performed phonemic and semantic fluency tasks …