Word fluency in aging and dementia: principles of relatedness in the generative naming process

Nineteen elderly people, some healthy, some Alzheimer patients, were given the Word Fluency Test. Their responses were correlated with several personal variables such as age, years of education, Mini-Mental-State score, etc. The responses were also analyzed in terms of types and percentage of word relatedness. It was found that the total number of response words, new words and percentage of word relatedness, correlates with the Mini-Mental-State score only. However, the degree of significance of the various correlations indicates a differential deterioration slope for various principles of relatedness. Results are discussed within the framework of semantic memory and its organizational principles.