Rofes Adrià, de Aguiar Vânia, Jonkers Roel, Oh Se Jin, DeDe Gayle, Sung Jee Eun
Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG), University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Department of Communication Disorders, EWHA Womans University, Seoul, South Korea.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jul 21;11:1485. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01485. eCollection 2020.
Animal fluency is a widely used task to assess people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other neurological disorders. The mechanisms that drive performance in this task are argued to rely on language and executive functions. However, there is little information regarding what specific aspects of these cognitive processes drive performance on this task.
To understand which aspects of language (i.e., semantics, phonological output lexicon, phonological assembly) and executive function (i.e., mental set shifting; information updating and monitoring; inhibition of possible responses) are involved in the performance of animal fluency in people with AD.
Animal fluency data from 58 people with probable AD from the DementiaBank Pittsburgh Corpus were analyzed. Number of clusters and switches were measured and nine word properties (e.g., frequency, familiarity) for each of the correct words (i.e., each word counting toward the total score, disregarding non-animals and repetitions) were determined. Random forests were used to understand which variables predicted the total number of correct words, and conditional inference trees were used to search for interactions between the variables. Finally, Wilcoxon tests were implemented to cross-validate the results, by comparing the performance of participants with scores below the norm in animal fluency against participants with scores within the norm based on a large normative sample.
Switches and age of acquisition emerged as the most important variables to predict total number of correct words in animal fluency in people with AD. Cross-validating the results, people with AD whose animal fluency scores fell below the norm produced fewer switches and words with lower age of acquisition than people with AD with scores in the normal range.
The results indicate that people with AD rely on executive functioning (information updating and monitoring) and language (phonological output lexicon, not necessarily semantics) to produce words on animal fluency.
动物流畅性任务是一种广泛用于评估阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者及其他神经障碍患者的方法。该任务中驱动表现的机制被认为依赖于语言和执行功能。然而，关于这些认知过程的哪些具体方面驱动了该任务的表现，相关信息很少。
了解语言的哪些方面（即语义、语音输出词库、语音组合）和执行功能（即心理定势转换；信息更新与监测；对可能反应的抑制）参与了AD患者的动物流畅性任务表现。
分析了来自匹兹堡痴呆症库语料库中58名可能患有AD的患者的动物流畅性数据。测量了聚类数和转换数，并确定了每个正确单词（即每个计入总分的单词，不考虑非动物单词和重复单词）的九个单词属性（如频率、熟悉度）。使用随机森林来了解哪些变量预测了正确单词的总数，并使用条件推断树来搜索变量之间的相互作用。最后，通过比较动物流畅性得分低于正常水平的参与者与基于大量正常样本得分在正常范围内的参与者的表现，实施威尔科克森检验以交叉验证结果。
转换数和习得年龄成为预测AD患者动物流畅性任务中正确单词总数的最重要变量。交叉验证结果显示，动物流畅性得分低于正常水平的AD患者比得分在正常范围内的AD患者产生的转换数更少，且习得年龄较低的单词更少。
结果表明，AD患者在动物流畅性任务中生成单词时依赖执行功能（信息更新与监测）和语言（语音输出词库，不一定是语义）。
Zotero 插件