Word Fluency in young and older people

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One of the most frequent complaints of elderly people is the difficulty in retrieval of proper names of their acquaintances and famous people. We administered word fluency tasks for semantic and phonological categories to elderly and young subjects. Subjects were asked to say aloud as many words in a given category as they could within 30 s. The number of words the elderly subjects could retrieve was approximately 75% of what the young subjects did. Especially, retrieval of famous persons'names was difficult for elderly subjects (their mean performance was about 55% of that of the young subjects). The time limit may be disadvantageous to elderly people because they require much time to do anything. However, time course analysis of word retrieval revealed that both the elderly and young subjects uttered the majority of words during the first 4 or 5 s, and the difference in performance between the two groups mainly relied on the performances during this initial period. Thus, the time limit is irrelevant to deficient word fluency in elderly people. The results showed that word retrieval ability apparently declines in elderly people.