Lanting Shawnda, Haugrud Nicole, Crossley Margaret
Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.
J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2009 Mar;15(2):196-204. doi: 10.1017/S1355617709090237. Epub 2009 Feb 10.
Past research has been inconsistent with regard to the effects of normal aging and sex on strategy use during verbal fluency performance. In the present study, both Troyer et al.'s (1997) and Abwender et al.'s (2001) scoring methods were used to measure switching and clustering strategies in 60 young and 72 older adults, equated on verbal ability. Young adults produced more words overall and switched more often during both phonemic and semantic fluency tasks, but performed similarly to older adults on measures of clustering. Although there were no sex differences in total words produced on either fluency task, males produced larger clusters on both tasks, and females switched more frequently than males on the semantic but not on the phonemic fluency task. Although clustering strategies appear to be relatively age-insensitive, age-related changes in switching strategies resulted in fewer overall words produced by older adults. This study provides evidence of age and sex differences in strategy use during verbal fluency tests, and illustrates the utility of combining Troyer's and Abwender's scoring procedures with in-depth categorization of clustering to understand interactions between age and sex during semantic fluency tasks.
过去的研究在正常衰老和性别对言语流畅性任务中策略使用的影响方面一直存在不一致的结果。在本研究中，采用了特罗耶等人（1997年）和阿布文德等人（2001年）的评分方法，对60名年轻人和72名老年人在言语能力上进行了匹配，以测量他们的转换和聚类策略。年轻人在音素和语义流畅性任务中总体上产生的单词更多，转换也更频繁，但在聚类测量方面与老年人表现相似。虽然在任何一项流畅性任务中，所产生的总单词数没有性别差异，但男性在两项任务中产生的聚类更大，并且在语义流畅性任务中女性比男性转换更频繁，而在音素流畅性任务中并非如此。虽然聚类策略似乎相对不受年龄影响，但转换策略中与年龄相关的变化导致老年人产生的总单词数减少。本研究提供了言语流畅性测试中策略使用方面年龄和性别差异的证据，并说明了将特罗耶的和阿布文德的评分程序与聚类的深入分类相结合，以理解语义流畅性任务中年龄与性别之间相互作用的效用。
