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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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Verbal fluency tests are quickly administered, easy to use, and regularly used in the neuropsychological assessment. The aim of this study was to present regression-based reference data for eight different verbal fluency tests in a Danish sample (aged 60-96 years) to determine the influence of age, gender, and education on test-performances. The results showed that age and education were significantly associated with both categories, lexical and alternating fluency tests, and gender had a significant impact on two tests. All tests were significantly correlated, but there was a much stronger association between tests of the same type (lexical versus category) than between different types of tests indicating that various fluency tasks draw on different cognitive abilities. Specific patterns of impairment can be analyzed using these normative data and may be important in the assessment of dementia spectrum disorders.

Vogel, A., Stokholm, J. & Jørgensen, K. (2011). Performances on Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and Rey Complex Figure Test in a healthy, elderly Danish sample - reference data and validity issues. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 26-31. This study presents Danish data for Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) and Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) from 100 subjects aged 60-87 years. Education and estimated verbal intelligence (DART score) had a significant impact on the RAVLT trial 1-5 score but not on other RAVLT measures. The RCFT copy score was significantly related to age and the DART score. On RCFT recall a highly significant difference was found between persons who could make a faultless copy and persons with incomplete copy performance. Thus, this study presents separate data for RCFT recall scores according to the subjects' copying performance (in separate tables for age and education groups). For all measures on both RAVLT and RCFT wide distributions of scores were found and the impact of this broad score range on the tests' discriminative validity is discussed. RAVLT performances for elderly were similar to previous published meta-norms, but the included sample of elderly Danes performed better on RCFT (copy and recall) than elderly from the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]