The distinctive effect of providing syllables in letter fluency testing: Literate vs. illiterate elderly persons

Abstract

The aim of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the effects of providing syllables in a letter fluency test. We compared the performance of 81 healthy elderly participants in a phonemic fluency test to their performance in a syllabic fluency test. These tests formed subtests within a letter fluency test in which participants were given either an initial phoneme or an initial syllable as a cue for word retrieval. Based on their scores on the literacy level test, we divided the participants into four groups, namely pure-illiterate, semi-illiterate, literate, and high-level literate. The pure-illiterate and semi-illiterate participants produced more correct words in the syllabic fluency test than in the phonemic fluency test. In contrast, literate and high-level literate participants produced more correct words in the phonemic fluency test than in the syllabic fluency test. An important implication of these findings is that the effect of providing phonemes/syllables to assist word retrieval might differ among people with varying literacy levels. Providing an initial phoneme to literate people leads to activation of many words beginning with the phoneme. Literates might use a strategy for retrieval of the appropriate words from the plentiful list of candidate words. However, providing an initial syllable to literates might lead to the activation of fewer words, as the pool of candidate words becomes smaller, constraining the word-generating capability. On the other hand, providing the direct and concrete information of a syllable might be more helpful to those with low literacy skills who lack access to such a strategy.