Naming Ability in Korean Elderly with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Mild Dementia

The present study explores the relationship between the short version of Korean Boston Naming Test (S-K-BNT), Controlled Oral Word Association Test phonemic (COWAT-/k/) & semantic (COWAT-Animal), and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) & Mild Dementia. Total of 594 communitydwelling seniors over 60 years of age consisting of normal elderly, (n=333) those with MCI (n=241), and those with mild dementia (n=20). In the results of the multinomial logistic regression analysis, all three naming tests showed a significant negative relationship with MCI and mild dementia in the case of the normal elderly. However, When all confounding factors were adjusted, phonemic fluency was not significant relationship with screening of mild dementia from MCI (p<0.05). Screening out mild dementia from MCI with verbal fluency will additionally require such qualitative analyses as semantic clustering, phonemic clustering, and switching.