BACKGROUND Verbal fluency relies on the coordinated activity between left frontal and temporal areas. Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) present phonemic and semantic fluency deficits. Recent studies suggest that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) enhances adaptative patterns of brain activity between functionally connected areas. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to assess ...

Background: Verbal fluency relies on the coordinated activity between left frontal and temporal areas.Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) present phonemic and semantic fluency deficits. Recent studiessuggest that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) enhances adaptative patterns of brain activitybetween functionally connected areas.Objective: The aimof this studywas ...

Two underlying components of verbal fluency tasks have been identified as clustering (the ability to generate successive words within a sub-category) and switching (the ability to shift from one sub-category to another). Selective impairment of switching ability occurs in patients with frontostriatal pathology, whilst clustering ability is compromised with temporal lobe dysfunction. Letter flue...

The main goal of this study was to produce adjusted normative data for the Portuguese population on two verbal fluency measures: the semantic fluency test (animals category) and the phonemic fluency test (letters M, R, and P). The study included 950 community-dwelling individuals (624 women and 326 men) aged between 18 and 98 (mean = 57.8, SD = 19.0), who had educational backgrounds ranging fro...

This study examined the relationship between phonemic and semantic (category) verbal fluency and cognitive status in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention (WRAP), a longitudinal cohort enriched for family history of Alzheimer's disease. Participants were 283 WRAP subjects (age 53.1[6.5] years at baseline); who had completed three waves of assessment, over ∼6 years and met psychometr...

Two components of verbal fluency performance--clustering (i.e., generating words within subcategories) and switching (i.e., shifting between subcategories)--were examined in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), patients with dementia with Parkinson's disease (DPD), nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (NPD), and demographically matched controls. The DAT and DPD groups we...

Category and letter fluency tasks are commonly used clinically to investigate the semantic and phonological processes central to speech production, but the neural correlates of these processes are difficult to establish with functional neuroimaging because of the relatively unconstrained nature of the tasks. This study investigated whether differential performance on semantic (category) and pho...

Objectives Cognitive deficits and language disorders, such as difficulty in word retrievals, are common among the elderly people. Verbal fluency as an index of word finding is one of the first cognitive functions that decline due to aging. Considering the lack of norms of verbal fluency in normal elderly Persian-speakers, the purpose of this research was to determine verbal fluency performance ...

Changes of cognitive function in PD have been extensively documented and defined as a 'frontal' type executive dysfunction. One of the main components of this executive dysfunction is the impairment of verbal fluency. The aim of the present study was to assess semantic and phonemic fluency in a large sample of PD patients and to investigate the effect of clinical and sociodemographic variables ...