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Spanish normative studies in young adults (NEURONORMA young adults project): norms for verbal fluency tests
M Casals-Coll1, G Sánchez-Benavides, M Quintana
1Grupo de Neurología de la Conducta y Demencias, Programa de Neurociencias, Instituto de Investigación Hospital del Mar (IMIM), Barcelona, España.
Introduction:
Lexical fluency tests are frequently used in clinical practice to assess language and executive function.
Objective:
As part of the Spanish normative studies project in young adults (NEURONORMA young adults project), we provide age- and education-adjusted normative data for 3 semantic fluency tasks (animals, fruits and vegetables, and kitchen tools), three formal lexical fluency tasks (words beginning with P, M and R), three excluded-letter fluency tasks (words excluding A, E and S) and a verb fluency task.
Material And Methods:
The sample consisted of 179 participants who are cognitively normal and range in age from 18 to 49 years. Tables are provided to convert raw scores to scaled scores. Age- and education-adjusted scores are provided by applying linear regression techniques.
Results:
The results show that education impacted most of the verbal fluency test scores, with no effects related to age and only minimal effects related to sex.
Conclusions:
The norms obtained will be extremely useful in the clinical evaluation of young Spanish adults.
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