On which abilities are category fluency and letter fluency grounded? A confirmatory factor analysis of 53 Alzheimer's dementia patients
Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 9, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
Ilaria Bizzozero1, Stefania Scotti, Francesca Clerici
1Neurology Unit, S. Paolo Hospital, University of Milan, Milan, Italy.
Background/Aims:
In Alzheimer's dementia (AD), letter fluency is less impaired than category fluency. To check whether category fluency and letter fluency depend differently on semantics and attention, 53 mild AD patients were given animal and letter fluency tasks, two semantic tests (the Verbal Semantic Questionnaire and the BORB Association Match test), and two attentional tests (the Stroop Colour-Word Interference test and the Digit Cancellation test).
Methods:
We conducted a LISREL confirmatory factor analysis to check the extent to which category fluency and letter fluency tasks were related to semantics and attention, viewed as latent variables.
Results:
Both types of fluency tasks were related to the latent variable Semantics but not to the latent variable Attention.
Conclusions:
Our findings warn against interpreting the disproportionate impairment of AD patients on category and letter fluency as a contrast between semantics and attention.
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