정상 노인의 연령에 따른 주의력 및 이름대기 능력의 차이

Abstract

As a decrease in cognitive ability through the aging process may lead to a decline in language ability, elderly people often have difficulties in communication. This study aims to examine attention and naming abilities of the elderly who are in the normal aging process and to define relations between these abilities. The subjects were 46 female elderly people who reside in the Gyeongsang-si, Gyeongbuk. They were divided into two groups (young old: 65∼74 years, old old: 75+ years) and an attention task and a naming task were carried out. As a result, the young old group had significantly higher rating scores in the divided attention task than the old old group. The old old group had significantly more errors than the young old group. In the noun and verb confrontation naming test, the old old group showed significantly lower performance than the young old group. Rating scores in the three attention tasks showed a slight positive correlation with S-K-BNT. Performance time with a sustained attention task showed a slight negative correlation with all three naming tasks. Putting the above research findings together, a decline in cognitive functions through the normal aging process may weaken handling complex attention processes or connection between semantic representation and phonologic representation of target words. Also, age effects about attention and naming abilities exist in different elderly groups.