Recall of clustered and unclustered word lists in elderly adults

We present descriptive data for alternate forms of clustered and unclustered word list recall in 102 healthy elderly adults and test results for 11 patients with Parkinson's disease. The word list test provided a relatively stable measure of verbal memory. Alternate forms were equivalent except for a tendency of the unclustered list of Form 1 to be easier than those of the other three forms. Verbal intelligence, total word recall, and the ability to cluster related words at recall were related significantly. There were modest effects of education on word recall; female subjects tended to recall more words than males.