Performances on five verbal fluency tests in a healthy, elderly Danish sample

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Abstract
Verbal fluency tests are widely used as measures of language and executive functions. This study presents data for five tests; semantic fluency (animals, supermarket items and alternating between cities and professions), lexical fluency (s-words), and action fluency (verbs) based on a sample of 100 cognitively intact elderly Danish subjects aged 60–87 years. We found mean scores similar to what has been reported from other countries. There was little influence of background variables: in four out of fives tests less than 20% of the variance could be explained by age, education, and estimated intelligence. Age had a greater impact than education on category based performance, while the opposite was the case for lexical- and action-based fluency. Overall, intelligence was of little importance. There was a positive and significant correlation between all tests, but with only low to moderate strength of association, indicating that various fluency tasks draw on different cognitive abilities and are not interchangeable.

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