Phonological and semantic strategies in a letter fluency task for people with Alzheimer’s disease

Jimin Park, Yae Rin Yoo, Yoonseob Lim, Jee Eun Sung

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Objectives: This study investigated whether employing a phonological or semantic strategy elicited a better performance on a letter fluency task for people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methods: Sixty participants with probable AD were extracted from the DementiaBank database. After applying exclusion criteria, 47 participants were included in the final analysis. We used phonological and semantic strategies to analyze participants’ responses to the letter fluency task. The phonological strategy analysis was based on the number of switches and the mean cluster size, and the semantic strategy analysis was based on semantic relatedness, which quantified word-similarity change by adapting the concept of persistence length from analyses of DNA and protein structures. We employed Pearson correlation coefficients to determine whether any strategy indexes were significantly related to the number of correct responses and used stepwise multiple regression analyses to determine the best predictor. Results: Participants who relied on phonological strategy performed better on the letter fluency task. The number of correct responses was significantly positively correlated with phonological strategy but significantly negatively correlated with semantic strategy. The number of switches, mean cluster size, and semantic relatedness were all significant predictors, explaining 68.1% of the variance. Conclusion: Our results suggested that individuals with AD who engaged in phonological strategy performed better on the letter fluency task than those who relied on semantic strategy.

Original languageEnglish
Article number1053272
JournalFrontiers in Psychology
Volume13
DOIs
StatePublished - 14 Dec 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was partly supported by the National Research Council of Science & Technology (NST) grant by the Korea Government (MSIT) (No. CAP21052-000), the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea Government (MSIT) (2022R1A2C2005062), and Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2022R1I1A4063209).

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2022 Park, Yoo, Lim and Sung.

Keywords

  • Alzheimer’s disease
  • letter fluency
  • phonological strategy
  • semantic relatedness
  • semantic strategy

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Phonological and semantic strategies in a letter fluency task for people with Alzheimer’s disease'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this