Evidence from neuroimaging and cerebellar lesion studies indicate that the cerebellum plays a role in language articulation and verbal fluency. Previous studies have established that distinct areas of the cerebellum are differentially active during each of these tasks, with articulation engaging the anterior cerebellum and verbal fluency activating areas of the right posterolateral cerebellum. ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Cognitive decline is a function of normal aging; however, the effect of age on various domains is differential. This study examined the effect of age on verbal fluency and showed how speed of processing modifies fluency performance in healthy older adults compared to younger individuals. METHODS Three age groups, 62 young (17-40 years), 30 middle-aged (41-59 years), and...

We show that retrieval from semantic memory is vulnerable even to the mere presence of speech. Irrelevant speech impairs semantic fluency--namely, lexical retrieval cued by a semantic category name--but only if it is meaningful (forward speech compared to reversed speech or words compared to nonwords). Moreover, speech related semantically to the retrieval category is more disruptive than unrel...

The Animal Verbal Fluency (AVF) and Design Fluency (DF) structured and unstructured test versions were administered to N = 294 healthy native Dutch-speaking children who were aged between 6.56 and 15.85 years. The AVF and DF structured test scores increased linearly as a function of age, whilst the relation between age and the DF unstructured test score was curvilinear (i.e., the improvement in...

OBJECTIVES Abnormal task-related activation and connectivity is present in schizophrenia. The aim of this study was the analysis of functional networks in schizophrenia patients in remission after the first episode. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Twenty-nine male patients in remission after the first episode of schizophrenia and 22 healthy controls underwent examination by functional magnetic resonance ...

The here presented and ongoing study addresses L2 fluency and hesitation phenomena in the context of speech effects in intercultural communication. It investigates the impact of fluency and hesitation phenomena on the perception of non-native speakers by native listeners of German. The first results underline the importance and salience of hesitation phenomena and fluency for speech effects and...

Psychologists have used the semantic fluency task for decades to gain insight into the processes and representations underlying memory retrieval. Recent work has suggested that a censored random walk on a semantic network resembles semantic fluency data because it produces optimal foraging. However, fluency data have rich structure beyond being consistent with optimal foraging. Under the assump...

Brain potentials associated with the manipulation of conceptual fluency in a recognition memory paradigm were recorded. Enhanced fluency was associated with attenuation of the N400 and an increased rate of subjects' endorsing both studied and non-studied items as having been studied ("old" responses) in the recognition test. Differences were also found in latencies previously associated with po...

This study assessed the effect of experimentally manipulated emotional arousal on swearing fluency. We hypothesised that swear word generation would be increased with raised emotional arousal. The emotional arousal of 60 participants was manipulated by having them play a first-person shooter video game or, as a control, a golf video game, in a randomised order. A behavioural measure of swearing...

With the advent of digital literacy, fluency in reading from the screen has become a key category in shaping reading proficiency. Furthermore, research focusing on digital reading fluency, especially in the English as Foreign Language (EFL) context, is scarce. Therefore, this study first seeks to explore the differences in the participants’ reading fluency in paper and digital reading environme...