Abstract
This study examined the contributions of verbal ability and executive control to verbal fluency performance in older adults (n = 82). Verbal fluency was assessed in letter and category fluency tasks, and performance on these tasks was related to indicators of vocabulary size, lexical access speed, updating, and inhibition ability. In regression analyses the number of words produced in both fluency tasks was predicted by updating ability, and the speed of the first response was predicted by vocabulary size and, for category fluency only, lexical access speed. These results highlight the hybrid character of both fluency tasks, which may limit their usefulness for research and clinical purposes.
Highlights
The verbal fluency test is a short test of verbal functioning (e.g., Lezak et al, 2012)
Verbal fluency tasks are widely used to assess verbal functioning in clinical and research settings. This is because the tasks have compelling face validity: A person with a serious deficit in lexical access, executive control abilities or both will perform poorly in the tasks
While fluency scores are useful indicators of general verbal functioning, it is for many purposes important to understand how strongly performance in the tasks is affected by each of the abilities involved
Summary
The verbal fluency test is a short test of verbal functioning (e.g., Lezak et al, 2012) It typically consists of two tasks: category fluency (sometimes called semantic fluency; Benton, 1968) and letter fluency (sometimes called phonemic fluency; Newcombe, 1969). Verbal fluency tasks are often included in neuropsychological assessment, in clinical practice, and in research. They have been used to support diagnoses of attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Andreou and Trott, 2013) and cognitive impairment in persons with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease (Zhao et al, 2013) or Parkinson’s disease (Pettit et al, 2013). Verbal fluency tasks have been used in research on non-clinical groups to measure verbal ability including lexical knowledge and lexical retrieval ability (e.g., Cohen et al, 1999; Weckerly et al, 2001; Federmeier et al, 2002, 2010) and as a test of executive control ability (e.g., Henry and Crawford, 2004; Fitzpatrick et al, 2013)
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