Performances on five verbal fluency tests in a healthy, elderly Danish sample.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Verbal fluency tests are crucial for assessing language and executive functions.
• Cognitive assessment in aging populations requires validated tools.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present normative data for five verbal fluency tests in cognitively intact elderly Danish subjects.
• To investigate the influence of age, education, and intelligence on performance in these tests.
• To examine the relationships between different types of verbal fluency tasks.

Main Methods:

• Data collected from 100 cognitively intact elderly Danish subjects (aged 60-87).
• Five verbal fluency tests administered: semantic fluency (animals, supermarket items, alternating categories), lexical fluency (s-words), and action fluency (verbs).
• Statistical analyses performed to assess the impact of background variables and correlations between tests.

Main Results:

• Mean scores were comparable to international data.
• Age, education, and intelligence explained less than 20% of the variance in four out of five tests.
• Age impacted category-based performance more than education; education impacted lexical and action fluency more than age.
• Intelligence showed little overall importance.

Conclusions:

• Verbal fluency tests in elderly Danes yield comparable results to other populations.
• Background variables like age and education have limited influence on performance.
• Different verbal fluency tasks measure distinct cognitive abilities and are not interchangeable.