A group of Swedish speakers’ performance on Swedish adaptations of the Bedside WAB-Rand CLQT : The performance of cognitively and linguistically nonimpaired adults on measures of language and cognition and its relationship to verbal fluency

Sammanfattning: There are currently no Swedish norms for the bedside version of the Western Aphasia Battery (B-WAB-R) and the Cognitive Linguistic Quick Test (CLQT). It is unknown whether age, gender, and education influence performance in a Swedish context. Verbal fluency tests measure language and cognition, but semantic and phonemic versions are associated with separate cognitive processes. The aim was to evaluate how non-impaired adults performed on Swedish translations of B-WAB-R and CLQT, and the verbal fluency tests FAS and Animal Naming. Fifty-two participants without linguistic or cognitive impairments aged 21–88 were recruited. Potential differences in performance depending on age, gender, and education were analysed, and how performance on FAS and Animal Naming related to CLQT, and B-WAB-R performance. Performance did not differ depending on gender or education. Some scores fell below previous CLQT cut-offs for mild cognitive impairment. Participants aged 30–49 had better performance than older groups on Animal Naming and the CLQT domains Attention, Executive Functions and Language, and better performance than the youngest group on Attention. Animal Naming was weakly related to both language and cognitive measures. FAS was not related to any other measure. The small and unequally distributed sample limits the generalizability of the results. More research is needed to determine how age and education influence performance on CLQT and B-WAB-R in Sweden. More research is also needed to determine whether phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tests measure the same cognitive processes.