A verbal planning impairment in adult ADHD indexed by script generation tasks.
OBJECTIVE
Though juvenile and adult ADHD cases are well known to have a nonverbal planning impairment, a verbal-planning impairment has been demonstrated only in juvenile ADHD. The purpose of this investigation is to determine whether a verbal planning impairment also characterizes adult ADHD.


METHODS
A cohort of 30 adult ADHD clients of a university psychological clinic are compared to 30 age-, education-, gender-, and IQ-matched persons recruited from the general population who did not have ADHD. The dependent measure is a set of 6 paper/pencil 10-item script generation tasks.


RESULTS
The findings reveal that the ADHD cohort was significantly impaired on the script task and the script task correlated significantly with severity of ADHD (CAARS index + WURS), whereas several neuropsychological measures of executive function (Stroop, COWA, Rey's Complex Figure, D2, CVLT, CPT-II) did not. Findings further showed that the script measure was weakly correlated with the other established neuropsychological measures of executive function (r < .46, shared variance of less than 21%).


CONCLUSIONS
On the basis of the study findings, it is concluded that verbal planning measured with script generation tasks is distinctly impaired in clinically referred adult ADHD.
Desjardins
Catherine
C
Université du Québec à Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
Scherzer
Peter
P
Braun
Claude M J
CM
Godbout
Lucie
L
Poissant
Hélène
H
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D003071:Cognition; D056344:Executive Function; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012720:Severity of Illness Index