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American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias®, Vol. 22, No. 3, 190-201 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1533317507301792

Verbal Fluency in Bilingual Spanish/English Alzheimer's Disease Patients

Judy Salvatierra, MA

Department of Psychology, Charles Schmidt College of Science Florida Atlantic University, Davie, Florida

Monica Rosselli, PhD

Department of Psychology, Charles Schmidt College of Science Florida Atlantic University, Davie, Florida, mrossell{at}fau.edu

Amarilis Acevedo, PhD

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, Wien Center for Alzheimers' Disease and Memory Disorders at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Miami Beach, Florida

Ranjan Duara, MD

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, Department of Medicine, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, Wien Center for Alzheimers' Disease and Memory Disorders at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Miami Beach, Florida

Studies have demonstrated that in verbal fluency tests, monolinguals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show greater difficulties retrieving words based on semantic rather than phonemic rules. The present study aimed to determine whether this difficulty was reproduced in both languages of Spanish/English bilinguals with mild to moderate AD whose primary language was Spanish. Performance on semantic and phonemic verbal fluency of 11 bilingual AD patients was compared to the performance of 11 cognitively normal, elderly bilingual individuals matched for gender, age, level of education, and degree of bilingualism. Cognitively normal subjects retrieved significantly more items under the semantic condition compared to the phonemic, whereas the performance of AD patients was similar under both conditions, suggesting greater decline in semantic verbal fluency tests. This pattern was produced in both languages, implying a related semantic decline in both languages. Results from this study should be considered preliminary because of the small sample size.

Key Words: Alzheimer's disease • Spanish • verbal fluency • language • bilingualism • dementia


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