Spanish normative studies in young adults (NEURONORMA young adults project): norms for verbal fluency tests

Abstract

Introduction: Lexical fluency tests are frequently used in clinical practice to assess language and executive function.

Objective: As part of the Spanish normative studies project in young adults (NEURONORMA young adults project), we provide age- and education-adjusted normative data for 3 semantic fluency tasks (animals, fruits and vegetables, and kitchen tools), three formal lexical fluency tasks (words beginning with P, M and R), three excluded-letter fluency tasks (words excluding A, E and S) and a verb fluency task.

Material and methods: The sample consisted of 179 participants who are cognitively normal and range in age from 18 to 49 years. Tables are provided to convert raw scores to scaled scores. Age- and education-adjusted scores are provided by applying linear regression techniques.

Results: The results show that education impacted most of the verbal fluency test scores, with no effects related to age and only minimal effects related to sex.

Conclusions: The norms obtained will be extremely useful in the clinical evaluation of young Spanish adults.