Adults have an interconnected lexicon in which two words are related because their referents belong to the same semantic category, because they occur in the same context, or both. This interconnection has been explored by means of the priming effect, in which people respond more rapidly to related than to unrelated words and benefit from the lexical boost when the two types of interconnections are combined. Although substantial research has reported on the memory problems of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), it remains unknown whether they experience problems with related words at these levels of comprehension. This study analyzed the lexical networks of older adults with AD and typically aging (TA) adults to understand their semantic memory related to word associations. We tested combined taxonomic-thematic, purely taxonomic, and purely thematic relationships using an eye tracker to analyze fixations to a named target picture preceded by a related or unrelated prime word. Participants with TA showed a priming effect in all three types of relationships, but those with AD showed this effect only with purely thematic pairs. Words that share more than one level of relationship seem to create competition, revealing a deficit in the lexical networks of people with AD.

A good knowledge of connectives like moreover and therefore is crucial for reading comprehension and academic success, yet not all connectives, especially infrequent connectives mostly used in writing, are well mastered even by adults. The main goal of this paper is to assess the possibility to improve the ability to use connectives in discourse during the transitional teenage years. To do so, we examined whether 228 native French-speaking teenagers and 60 adults improved their performance with eight infrequent (prototypical and non-prototypical) connectives in a sentence-completion task after active or passive training. The results revealed that training had only a limited effect on the ability to use both types of connectives, while the degree of exposure to print was an important predictor of individual variations. These findings suggest that connectives’ mastery depends more on exposure to extensive written input that allows to internalize their procedural meaning over time rather than on one-time explicit activation of the mapping between their form and function.