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

老年人最常抱怨的问题之一是难以检索熟人和名人的专有名称。在先前的研究中，我们管理的词汇流畅性任务的语义和语音类别的老年人和年轻的主题。受试者被要求在30秒内大声说出给定类别中尽可能多的单词。老年受试者可以检索的单词数量大约是年轻受试者的75%。特别是，老年被试对名人姓名的提取比较困难，平均成绩只有青年被试的55%左右，而对名人姓名的提取在青年被试中也是最困难的。实验一对24名健康老年人进行了为期3年的词汇流畅性任务的跟踪研究。在后续的研究中，专有名称的难度被重复，发现在两个研究中检索到的名人的名字的内容的一致性低于其他类别。在另一个新类别的流利性任务（实验2）和特征描述任务（实验3）中也发现了专有名称的困难，这些任务包括各种著名的名称以及生物和非生物，如动物，水果，鸟类，工具和车辆。这些发现表明，一个人一生中对专名的语义知识的构建可能与普通名词不同，这可能会导致专名比普通名词更难找词。

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.