title: Category size effects in semantic and letter fluency in Alzheimer's patients.
abstract: Many studies have found that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) perform significantly worse than normal controls on verbal fluency tasks. Moreover, some studies have found that AD patients' deficits compared to controls are more severe for semantic fluency (e.g., vegetables) than for letter fluency (e.g. words that begin with F). These studies, however, have not taken category size into account. A comparison of AD patients and age-matched controls on three semantic and three letter categories revealed that both the size and type of a category significantly predicted AD patients' deficits on verbal fluency tasks. These results suggest that the verbal fluency of AD patients will be most attenuated on large semantic categories.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Lehman College, CUNY, USA. mikediaz@uiuc.edu
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Diaz
authors.forename: Kevin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sailor
authors.forename: Doris
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cheung
authors.forename: Gail
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kuslansky
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011930:Reaction Time; D012016:Reference Values; D012660:Semantics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement