Incidence of Word Finding Deficits in Normal Aging

The incidence and pattern of word finding deficits was investigated in a group of 50 non-neurologically-impaired older adults, ranging in age from 54 to 75. The Test of Adolescent/Adult Word Finding (TAWF; German, 1990) was administered to all individuals. Overall, 28% of the adults exhibited abnormal word finding standard scores on the TAWF. Specifically, 3 word finding profiles were observed: (1) normal psychometric scores and normal word retrieval performance across all subtests; (2) normal psychometric performance with selective impairment on picture naming of nouns, and (3) abnormal word finding standard scores with impaired performance on more than 1 subtest, which included picture naming of nouns as well as category naming. The most frequently occurring error type on picture naming of nouns was productions that were semantically related to the target. The results are discussed relative to the representation of information in semantic memory and its interaction with the lexicon.