Performances on five verbal fluency tests in a healthy, elderly Danish sample

Verbal fluency tests are widely used as measures of language and executive functions. This study presents data for five tests; semantic fluency (animals, supermarket items and alternating between cities and professions), lexical fluency (s-words), and action fluency (verbs) based on a sample of 100 cognitively intact elderly Danish subjects aged 60-87 years. We found mean scores similar to what has been reported from other countries. There was little influence of background variables: in four out of fives tests less than 20% of the variance could be explained by age, education, and estimated intelligence. Age had a greater impact than education on category based performance, while the opposite was the case for lexical- and action-based fluency. Overall, intelligence was of little importance. There was a positive and significant correlation between all tests, but with only low to moderate strength of association, indicating that various fluency tasks draw on different cognitive abilities and are not interchangeable.