Reversal of the concreteness effect can be detected in the natural speech of older adults with amnestic, but not non-amnestic, mild cognitive impairment.

Introduction: Patients with Alzheimer's disease present with difficulty in lexical retrieval and reversal of the concreteness effect in nouns. Little is known about the phenomena before the onset of symptoms. We anticipate early linguistic signs in the speech of people who suffer from amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI).