Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To present performance norms and discrepancy score of three one-minute verbal fluency tasks (VFTs); to investigate age and education effects; to analyze the differences between time intervals; and to investigate whether these differences varied according to age and education. METHOD: Three hundred adults divided into three age groups (19-39; 40-59; 60-75) and two groups of educational level (2 to 7 years; 8 years or more) performed unconstrained, semantic, and phonemic VFTs. We compared the performance of the groups using two-way ANOVA with post-hoc Bonferroni test. The depression scale score was covariate. The time interval of verbal fluency was the variable used for subjects' comparison (repeated measures ANOVA). RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that there are age and education effects on phonemic and unconstrained VFTs. We also found an interaction between those variables in the semantic VFT (time intervals and total time) and in the differences between semantic and phonemic tasks. The repeated measures analysis revealed age effects on semantic VFTs and education effects on the phonemic and semantic VFTs. Such findings are relevant for clinical neuropsychology, contributing to avoid false-positive or false-negative interpretation.

Highlights

  • Our results indicated age and education had main effects in accuracy performance of the two time intervals and total scores of Unconstrained Verbal Fluency Task (UVFT) and Phonemic Verbal Fluency Task (PVFT) tasks; while it was found an interaction of these variables in Semantic Verbal Fluency Task (SVFT) and in the discrepancy score of SVFT-PVFT

  • Age Effects in Verbal Fluency Task Performance With regard to the age variable, we found a significant age effect on the total score and on the two time intervals in the UVFT and PVFT tasks; in addition, older adults had lower scores than those participants in the 19-39 and 40-59 years age groups

  • verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) seem to be differentially affected by age and education

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Summary

Methods

Participants Three hundred neurologically healthy adults were included from the normative sample of the adaptation of the Montreal Evaluation Communication (MEC) Battery to Brazilian Portuguese (Fonseca, Parente, Côté, Ska, & Joanette, 2008; Joanette, Ska, & Côté, 2004). We investigated signs suggestive of major depression using the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS; Almeida & Almeida, 1999; Yesavage, Brink, Rose, & Lurn, 1983). Deficits suggestive of dementia were investigated among 40-yearold or older participants using the Mini-Mental State Examination (Chaves & Izquierdo, 1992). Low education group was comprised of participants that studied two to six years; while high education sample was composed by whom studied seven years or more

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