Purpose: This study reports on how very old (VO) Finnish people without dementia
perform in the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and two verbal fluency tasks and
which demographic factors predict the performance.
Method: The study included fifty 80- to 100-year-old community-dwelling
Finnish speakers with no dementing illnesses or speech-language disabilities,
who completed the WAB and two verbal fluency tasks. Multifactorial statistical
analyses with recursive partitioning were carried out to determine the significant
predictors out of five predictor variables (age, gender, education, dentition, and
Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE]) for four response variables (WAB
Aphasia Quotient [AQ], Language Quotient [LQ], semantic, and phonemic word
fluencies).
Results: Overall, individual variation was notable in VO speakers. All predictor
variables were statistically significantly associated with one or more of the language
skills. Age was the most significant predictor; the critical age of 85–86 years was
associated with a decline in WAB-AQ and semantic fluency. Poor dentition and the
MMSE score both predicted a decline in WAB-LQ and phonemic fluency. A high
level of education was positively associated with the skills of the best-performing
individuals in WAB-AQ, WAB-LQ, and semantic fluency.
Conclusions: VO age is a significant factor contributing to language performance.
However, a younger age, a good cognitive performance, intact teeth, and a higher
educational level also seem to have a preservative power as regards language
skills. Gender differences should be interpreted with caution. The results of
this study provide culture- and language-specific normative data, which aids
in differentiating typical aging from the signs of acute or degenerative
neuropathology to ensure appropriate medical and therapeutic interventions.