LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 11 : 7 July 2011
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

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Qualitative Analysis of Clustering on Verbal Fluency in
Young Adults

Sunila John, Lavya M. Jose, and B. Rajashekar

Introduction

Tests of verbal fluency or word list generation are frequently used in clinical and experimental research of cognitive function. In general, these are operationalized as the number of words produced, usually within a restricted category and within a given time limit (Spreen & Strauss, 1998). There are several types of tasks that measure verbal fluency. It is typically tested in letter and category domains. The most common tasks used are letter or phonemic fluencies, where participants need to generate as many words as possible beginning with a specified letter such as F, A, or S in a limited time (Raskin, Sliwinski, & Borod, 1992; Troyer, Moscovitch, Winocur, Alexander & Stuss, 1998), and semantic fluencies, where words must belong to a specified semantic category like “Animal” , “Fruit” or “Supermarket” (Beatty, Monson, & Goodkin, 1989; Troyer, 2000).

Successful performance on verbal fluency is thought to depend on the ability to initiate, search and retrieve data from the lexicon or the semantic memory system and on efficient executive functioning, including attention (Rosser & Hodges, 1994). These tasks, therefore assess language function (vocabulary size, naming), speed of response, mental organization, search strategies & long-term memory (Ruff, Light, Parker & Levin, 1997).

Although the instructions for both these tasks are the same, there is a difference in their performance. This difference in performance is due to the variation in the hierarchical organization of the two categories (letters vs. semantic category) in the brain. The retrieval of letters requires exploration of more subsets of categories than the retrieval of names of a specified semantic category (e.g. animals) (Riva, Nichelli, & Devoti, 2000). Performance on these tasks is dependent upon a number of variables including age, gender, education, literacy level, ethnicity and intelligence (Kempler, Teng, Dick, Tuassig & Davis, 1998; Ratcliff, Ganguli, Chandra, Sharma, Belle, Seaberg & Pandav, 1998; Mathuranath, George, Cherian, Alexander, Sarma & Sarma, 2002).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Sunila John, MASLP
Assistant Professor
Department of Speech and Hearing
Manipal College of Allied Health Sciences
Manipal University
Manipal 576104
Karnataka, India
sunila.john@manipal.edu

Lavya M. Jose, BASLP
Department of Speech and Hearing
Manipal College of Allied Health Sciences
Manipal University
Manipal 576104
Karnataka, India
lavyajose@gmail.com

B. Rajashekhar, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Speech and Hearing
Manipal College of Allied Health Sciences
Manipal University
Manipal 576104
Karnataka, India
b.raja@manipal.edu





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