Spanish normative studies in young adults (NEURONORMA young adults project): norms for verbal fluency tests.
BACKGROUND
Lexical fluency tests are frequently used in clinical practice to assess language and executive function.


OBJECTIVE
As part of the Spanish normative studies project in young adults (NEURONORMA young adults project), we provide age- and education-adjusted normative data for 3 semantic fluency tasks (animals, fruits and vegetables, and kitchen tools), three formal lexical fluency tasks (words beginning with P, M and R), three excluded-letter fluency tasks (words excluding A, E and S) and a verb fluency task.


METHODS
The sample consisted of 179 participants who are cognitively normal and range in age from 18 to 49 years. Tables are provided to convert raw scores to scaled scores. Age- and education-adjusted scores are provided by applying linear regression techniques.


RESULTS
The results show that education impacted most of the verbal fluency test scores, with no effects related to age and only minimal effects related to sex.


CONCLUSIONS
The norms obtained will be extremely useful in the clinical evaluation of young Spanish adults.
Grupo de Neurología de la Conducta y Demencias, Programa de Neurociencias, Instituto de Investigación Hospital del Mar (IMIM), Barcelona, España.
M
M
Casals-Coll
G
G
Sánchez-Benavides
M
M
Quintana
R M
RM
Manero
T
T
Rognoni
L
L
Calvo
R
R
Palomo
F
F
Aranciva
F
F
Tamayo
J
J
Peña-Casanova
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology; D004522:Educational Status; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests / Q000592:standards*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012016:Reference Values; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D013030:Spain; D055815:Young Adult