Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology, The University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Knoxville.
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.
Am J Speech Lang Pathol. 2021 Feb 11;30(1S):481-490. doi: 10.1044/2019_AJSLP-19-00052. Epub 2020 Jun 18.
Purpose To date, verb fluency tasks have been mainly analyzed quantitatively for individuals with dementia. Qualitative analysis, however, such as examining the semantic and psycholinguistic content of the responses might further inform researchers and clinicians about patients' cognitive and linguistic status. Therefore, the current study examined psycholinguistic and lexical characteristics of verb fluency responses in individuals with probable Alzheimer's disease (pAD) and healthy older adults to delineate qualitative and quantitative differences between the two groups. Method The verb fluency responses from participants with pAD (amnestic type) were compared to those from age- and education-matched healthy older adults. The responses were analyzed with respect to the number and proportion of correct responses, word frequency, age of acquisition, phoneme and syllable length, and neighborhood density. The verb responses were also categorized into mental state verbs and action verbs. Additionally, a battery of cognitive-linguistic tests was administered, and for each group, relationships between correct verb fluency responses and other cognitive-linguistic skills were investigated using correlation and regression analyses. Results Similar to previous findings regarding noun retrieval in dementia, the results revealed that individuals with pAD not only produced fewer correct verb fluency responses but also generated little to no mental state verbs compared to the control group. The group with pAD also produced verbs with shorter phoneme and syllable lengths, higher word frequency, and earlier age of acquisition ratings relative to the healthy older adults. The number of correct verb fluency responses was mainly predicted by a reading comprehension score in the pAD group and a nonverbal fluency test score in the healthy group. Conclusion The current quantitative and qualitative findings add support to the contention that lexical-semantic impairments underlie word retrieval problems in pAD and such difficulties present in generative naming paradigms and also across grammatical categories.
目的 迄今为止，动词流畅性任务主要针对痴呆患者进行定量分析。然而，定性分析，例如检查反应的语义和心理语言学内容，可能会进一步为研究人员和临床医生提供有关患者认知和语言状况的信息。因此，本研究检查了可能患有阿尔茨海默病 (pAD) 的个体和健康老年人的动词流畅性反应的心理语言学和词汇特征，以描绘两组之间的定性和定量差异。
方法 将 pAD（遗忘型）患者的动词流畅性反应与年龄和教育相匹配的健康老年人的反应进行比较。从正确反应的数量和比例、单词频率、习得年龄、音素和音节长度以及近邻密度等方面对反应进行了分析。动词反应也分为心理状态动词和动作动词。此外，还进行了一系列认知语言测试，并对每组进行了相关性和回归分析，以研究正确的动词流畅性反应与其他认知语言技能之间的关系。
结果 与痴呆症中名词检索的先前发现相似，结果表明，与对照组相比，pAD 患者不仅产生较少的正确动词流畅性反应，而且产生的心理状态动词很少或根本没有。与健康老年人相比，pAD 组产生的动词音素和音节长度较短、单词频率较高、习得年龄较早。正确动词流畅性反应的数量主要由 pAD 组的阅读理解分数和健康组的非语言流畅性测试分数预测。
结论 目前的定量和定性研究结果为以下论点提供了支持，即词汇语义损伤是 pAD 单词检索问题的基础，这种困难存在于生成命名范式中，也存在于语法类别中。
