Word Fluency in young and older people

老年人最常见的抱怨之一是难以检索他们熟人和名人的适当姓名。我们对老年人和年轻人进行了语义和语音类别的单词流畅性任务。研究人员要求受试者在30名S以内的时间内，尽可能多地大声朗读某一类别中的单词。老年受试者能够回忆起的单词数量大约是年轻受试者的75%。尤其是对于老年人来说，名人姓名的检索比较困难(他们的平均成绩约为年轻人的55%)。时间限制可能对老年人不利，因为他们需要很长时间才能做任何事情。而词汇提取的时间进程分析显示，在前4、5个S阶段，老年人和青少年都是词汇发放量最大的被试，两组词汇提取成绩的差异主要取决于这一初始阶段的成绩。因此，时间限制与老年人词汇流利性不足无关。结果表明，老年人的词提取能力明显下降。

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.