Verbal fluency in aging and dementia

Abstract

Fluency tasks from two categories, animals and words beginning with a specified letter (“C”, “F”, “L”), were administered to normal elderly and to elderly with mild or moderate-to-severe senile dementia of the Alzheimer type. In both tasks, normals were superior to both dementia groups, while the mild dementia group was less impaired. Normals and mild dementia subjects retrieved more animal names than “CFL” words. Compared with normals, mild dementia subjects showed a greater performance decrement on the “CFL” words task than on animal naming. Moderate-to-severe dementia subjects showed no difference between tasks. Results suggest that (1) category structure influences retrieval processes, (2) components of the structure are affected differentially during the disease process.