Comparing the difficulty of letters, semantic, and name fluency tasks for normal elderly

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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. In the previous study, 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 ; the mean performance was about 55% of that of the young subjects, though retrieval of famous person's names was most difficult even in the young adults.In this study, three experiments were performed to investigate the consistency of the proper-name difficulty. In Exp.1,the 3-years follow-up study of word fluency tasks with the same categories was administered to 24 healthy older adults. The proper-name difficulty was replicated in the follow-up study with the finding that the consistency of contents of famous person's names retrieved in two studies was lower than the other categories. The proper-name difficulty was also found in another fluency tasks (Exp.2) with new categories and in the feature-description tasks (Exp.3) with various famous names as well as living-things and non-living things such as animals, fruits, birds, tools, and vehicles. These findings suggested that semantic knowledge for proper-names may be constructed in one's lifetime differently from that of common nouns and this might cause the word-finding difficulty of proper names than common nouns.