Verbal fluency in elderly bilingual speakers: Normative data and preliminary application to Alzheimer's disease

This study investigated verbal fluency abilities in 30 healthy elderly Engl ish-Afrikaans bilingual speakers, and 6 bilingual subjects with Alzheimer's disease. Three 1-min semantic verbal fluency tasks (animals) were obtained in the bilingual mode, Afrikaans and English. Results were analysed in ter ms of total correct, and semantic clusters. There was no significant differ ence between monolingual and bilingual performance. Some healthy bilingual subjects used code switching as a strategy but with no direct increase in t he number of exemplars generated, and there was no relationship between age of acquisition, pattern of use and verbal fluency scores, In comparison, s ubjects with Alzheimer's disease did not make use of code switching strateg ies, and there was some relationship between age of acquisition, pattern of use and verbal fluency scores. Copyright (C) 2001 S. Karger AG, Basel.