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

老年人最常见的抱怨之一是很难记住熟人和名人的专有名称。在之前的研究中，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。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。老年受试者能够检索的单词数量大约是年轻受试者的75%。其中，老年人对名人姓名的检索较为困难；平均表现约为年轻受试者的55%，尽管在年轻人中检索名人的名字是最困难的。本研究通过三个实验来考察专业名称难度的一致性。在实验1中，对24名健康老年人进行了相同类别的单词流利性任务的3年随访研究。在后续的研究中重复了专有名称困难，发现两项研究中检索到的名人名称内容的一致性低于其他类别。在另一个具有新类别的流利性任务（Exp.2）和具有各种著名名称以及生物和非生物（如动物、水果、鸟类、工具和车辆）的特征描述任务（Exp.3）中也发现了专有名称困难。这些发现表明，专有名词的语义知识可能在一个人的一生中与普通名词的语义知识构建不同，这可能导致专有名词比普通名词找词困难。

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.