Research Paper: Developing a Persian Verbal Fluency Test and Comparing the Results Between Healthy Persian Speakers and Persian Speakers Patients With Alzheimer Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment Publisher



Khatoonabadi AR^{1, 2} ; Aghajanzadeh M¹ ; Maroufizadeh S³ ; Vahabi Z² ; Safaeian A⁴ Show Affiliations
Source: Iranian Rehabilitation Journal Published:2021

Abstract

Objectives: Phonemic and semantic fluency tasks are used for verbal fluency (VF) evaluation. The present study aimed to select the most appropriate semantic categories and the mostfrequent phonemes of Persian as items for the VF test. Then, we determine the test results indifferentiation between cognitively intact people and those with Mild Cognitive Impairment(MCI) and Alzheimer Disease (AD).Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 120 people (60 cognitively intact, 30with AD, and 30 with MCI) in two phases. In phase one, linguists determine the most frequentphonemes at the beginning of Persian words and the most frequent semantic categories basedon a survey. In phase two, the verbal fluency test was administered to cognitively intact peopleand those with cognitive impairment (patients with AD and MCI). One-way ANOVA andmultiple linear regression were used for statistical analysis.Results: The normal subjects scored significantly higher in all phonemic and semantic fluencytasks than the patients with AD and people with MCI (P<0.05). Regarding the phonemic VFtask, the phonemes /sh/, /s/, and then /a/ were better in differentiating the MCI and AD groupsfrom the normal group. Regarding the semantic VF task, the animals’ category was betterdifferentiated the MCI and AD groups from the normal group.Discussion: Comparing frequent phonemes and semantic categories of Persian across threegroups of normal, AD, and MCI showed that some phonemes and semantic categories can bemore differentiating in the VF task. However, it is a preliminary validation study, and this topicneeds more investigation in the future © 2021. Iranian Rehabilitation Journal. All Rights Reserved.