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2004 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary

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

Research Project

Project/Area Number 14510112
Research Category

Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)

Allocation TypeSingle-year Grants
Section一般
Research Field 実験系心理学
Research InstitutionTokyo Metropolitan Foundation for Research on Aging and Promotion of Human Welfare

Principal Investigator

SAKUMA Naoko  Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of gerontology, Research Associate, 福祉振興財団・東京都老人総合研究所, 研究助手 (70152163)

Project Period (FY) 2002 – 2004
Keywordsnormal aging / word retrieval / word fluency / proper name / semantic category
Research Abstract

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.

  • Research Products

    (4 results)

All 2003 2002

All Journal Article (4 results)

  • [Journal Article] 48カテゴリーによる健常高齢者の語想起能力の検討2003

    • Author(s)
      佐久間尚子, 田中正之, 伏見貴夫, 伊集院睦雄, 辰巳格, 他
    • Journal Title

      電子情報通信学会技術研究報告(信学技報TL2003-13) 13

      Pages: 73-78

    • Description
      「研究成果報告書概要(和文)」より
  • [Journal Article] Word fluency in healthy older adults : Evidence from 48 letter, semantic, and proper-name fluency tasks2003

    • Author(s)
      SAKUMA, N., TANAKA, M., FUSHIMI, T., et al.
    • Journal Title

      Technical Report of IEICE TL 2003-13

      Pages: 73-78

    • Description
      「研究成果報告書概要(欧文)」より
  • [Journal Article] 単語の想起と発話にかかわる脳内ネットワークとその加齢変化2002

    • Author(s)
      辰巳 格, 伏見貴夫, 佐久間尚子, 千田道雄, 石井賢二, 他
    • Journal Title

      電子情報通信学会技術研究報告(信学技報TL2002-31) 31

      Pages: 37-41

    • Description
      「研究成果報告書概要(和文)」より
  • [Journal Article] Brain Regions for Word Retrieval and Speech Production, and Impact of Aging2002

    • Author(s)
      TATSUMI, I.R, FUSHIMI, T., SAKUMA, N., et al.
    • Journal Title

      Technical Report of IEICE TL 2002-31

      Pages: 37-42

    • Description
      「研究成果報告書概要(欧文)」より

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Published: 2006-07-11  

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