Animal Naming Performance in Korean Elderly: Effects of age, education, and gender, and Typicality

Abstract

The animal naming test (ANT) is known to be influenced not only by age, gender, and education but only by ethnicity, culture, and language. Thus, population-specific norm considering these variables needs to be developed for Korean-speaking elderly. We evaluated 185 healthy elderly people with five measures. Education was the single statistically independent correlate of the total number of words (R² = .312, p = .038). After adjusting for education, there was slightly significant negative correlation (r = -.215, p = .049) between age and total number of words. Mean number of words produced was 13.71±3.09. The production frequency was negatively correlated with the typicality rating (r = -0.41, p ＜ .05). The concrete and exact scoring rule could be set up in the comparison of naming performance between a normal and patient with neuro-linguistic disorder and its data could be utilized in a differential diagnosis for patients with neurological disorders.