The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

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ArticleTitle	Performance of verbal fluency tasks in Japanese healthy adults -Effect of gender, age and education on the performance-
Language	J
AuthorList	Emi Ito¹⁾²⁾, Takeshi Hatta²⁾, Yasuhiro Ito²⁾, Terumasa Kogure³⁾, Hama Watanabe⁴⁾
Affiliation	1) Department of Occupational Therapy, School of Health Sciences, Nagoya University 2) Department of Psychology, Division of Social and Human Environment, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University 3) Cognition and Lifelong Department, Research Center for Lifelong Learning and Education, Fukushima University 4) Department of Physical and Health Education, Graduate School of Education, Tokyo University
Publication	Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 20 (4), 254-263, 2004
Received	Jan 22, 2004
Accepted	Jun 25, 2004
Abstract	The purpose of this survey was to provide the norms of letter fluency (LF) and category fluency (CF) tasks in Japanese version and examine the effect of gender, age and years of education on both fluency tasks. We conducted the verbal fluency tasks (LF and CF tasks) to Japanese healthy adults whose age ranged from 18 to 91. For the LF task, 732 participants were given the letters 'A', 'Ka' and 'Shi'. For the CF task, 625 participants were given the three category names 'Animal', 'Occupation' and 'Sport'. These tasks were carefully selected by referring to the NTT Japanese database (Amano & Kondo, 1999) and category norms for verbal items (Ogawa, 1972). Examiners asked each participant to generate as many words as possible orally for 1 minute every task. The mean score of LF tasks was 23.9 (SD9.9) and that of CF tasks was 37.8 (SD12.3). An ANOVA revealed a main effect for age (L.F.: F (6,685) =5.15, p<0.001, C.F.: F (6,600) =9.154, p<0.001) and education (L.F.: F (3,685) =8.486, p<0.001, C.F.: F (3,600) =9.447, p<0.001) but no main effect for gender. Moreover the performance of L.F. in Japanese version was significantly lower than FAS English version. Performance of Verbal fluency tasks in the present study could be applicable to clinical settings and community health fields in Japanese society.
Keywords	performance of verbal fluency tasks, Japanese healthy subjects, effect of age, education and sex