Learning new songs in late Alzheimer’s disease: Do verbal and melodic feature recognition depend on encoding settings?

People with Alzheimer’s disease (PWAD) show preservation of remote memory for songs. However, our recent findings suggest that they may also be able to encode new musical stimuli, but only for non-verbal information. Here, we tried to assess whether verbal and musical features of unknown songs could be encoded after 8 days of exposures sessions with two presentation formats: only listening (Audio group) or listening with lyrics (Audio-Textual group). Subsequent to the test session, allowing to separately assess the recognition for songs, melodies alone, and lyrics alone (versus distractors) shows that both complete songs and melodies targets were better recognized than distractors, whereas lyrics alone do not give rise to significant recognition for the Audio group. Contrary to our expectations, the Audio-Textual group showed impaired performance compared to the Audio group both in learning and retrieving all type of information, as no recognition was possible regardless of the format (lyrics, melodies and songs). This lack of improvement in lyrics recognition of the Audio-textual group could be explain by a divided attention situation (between the reading task and the background audio stimuli), hence the very poor performance for PWAD at severe stage of the illness, even for the recognition for song or melodies alone.