Investigation of age and education level dependent performance of healthy adults in rapid automatic naming

Even if older adults do not have a pathological condition in word finding, it is known that the accuracy of the word produced decreases and the time required to name items increases. Rapid automatic naming (RAN) is a task that measures how quickly individuals can name objects, colours, letters and numbers aloud. Rapid automatic naming skill reflects multifactorial demands such as lexical access speed, lexical access, visual perception, processing time between semantic categorisation and motor output stages, and language-cognitive skills such as attentional sustainability. One of the most commonly reported complaints with increasing age is naming difficulties. In this study, the variation of rapid automatic naming skills (naming accuracy, naming initiation time, revision during naming, and total naming time for each subtask) with respect to age and educational level was analyzed and compared across age and educational level groups with data obtained from young adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults. The participants of the study consisted of 157 healthy individuals between the ages of 20-65. The participants included in the study consisted of individuals who did not have any neurological and psychiatric diseases, whose mother tongue was Turkish, who could read and write, who were not colour-blind and who did not have severe visual loss. After the Consent Form was filled in and demographic information about age and education were obtained, Montreal Cognitive Assessment Scale, Edinburgh Hand Preference Inventory, Diadokinetic Speed, Ishihara Test and Rapid Automatic Naming tasks were applied to the participants. Statistical analyses revealed that there were age-related differences in rapid automatic naming skills. Rapid automatic naming skill; naming accuracy, naming initiation time, revision during naming and total naming time for each subtask were compared between groups. It was found that increasing age and education level affected the naming time in all subtasks of the rapid automatic naming skill. Differences were observed between the groups in terms of naming errors, revision and reaction time in both single and multiple subtasks of rapid automatic naming, as well as in symbolic and non-symbolic tasks.