Age-related psychomotor slowing as an important component of verbal fluency

Abstract

Generalized psychomotor slowing is a characteristic of normal aging, and there is evidence suggesting that this feature is also central in dementia. The present article aims to evaluate the importance of psychomotor slowing as a factor underlying changes in the performance of verbal fluency tasks in normal and pathological aging. In study 1 reading and handwriting speed were used to predict performance on written and oral verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) in healthy elderly subjects (n = 20) and in patients of the Alzheimer type disease (n = 20). In study 2, spectrographic techniques were used to obtain reaction times, average of voice intensity and duration of single word production in young individuals (n = 20), healthy elderly subjects (n = 20), and in patients of the Alzheimer type disease (n = 7). Additionally, duration of single word production were also obtained. The results suggest that age-related psychomotor decline in word production speed is an important determinant of VFT.

Sex Difference in Cognitive Aging for Letter Fluency and Semantic Fluency

“…This means that cognitive functions related to the LFT show an earlier decline. This finding coincides with findings from a variety of other cultural-linguistic backgrounds, e.g., English, Chinese, Danish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese [4,19,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39].…”

Do the letters F, A and S represent Indonesian letter fluency stimuli?

“…As mentioned in our previous study (Hendrawan and Hatta, 2010), the letters F, A and S are the most frequently presented letters by participants across different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. This is true not only for native English speakers (Borkowski et al, 1967) but also for speakers from different nationalities, including Norwegians (Rodriguez-Aranda et al, 2006), Italians (Leggio et al, 2000), Swedish (Ostberg et al, 2005), French (Sauzeon et al, 2004) and Germans (Weiss et al, 2006). However, it remains unclear whether the production of words beginning with the specific stimuli F, A or S is equivalent across different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds (Senhorini et al, 2006).…”

‘Ngana minyarti? What is this?’ Development of cognitive questions for the Kimberley Indigenous Cognitive Assessment

“…Category verbal fluency tests are an effective measure of executive functioning [24] and dementia [25]. The category task that was accepted by participants is naming animals (that can be hunted) within a timeframe of 60 seconds.…”