Age Differences in Word Finding in Discourse and Nondiscourse Situations

Measures of word finding in discourse (video description task) and nondiscourse situations (word fluency tasks) were obtained from a sample of 90 community-dwelling healthy adults. Age differences were found in the accuracy and uncertainty of the labels used to refer to the characters and objects depicted in the video description task and in the number of correct responses in the category fluency task. There was a significant amount of shared variance between the 2 types of tasks. More important, there was a significant amount of variance in the video discourse task associated with age that was independent of performance in the word fluency task. The communicative impact of a word-finding problem and need for discourse level study are discussed.