OBJECTIVE Verbal fluency measures are frequently part of batteries designed to assess executive function (EF), but are also used to assess semantic processing ability or word knowledge. The goal of the present study was to identify the cognitive components underlying fluency performance. METHOD Healthy young and older adults, adults with Parkinson's disease, and adults with Alzheimer's diseas...

Semantic fluency is a commonly used task in psychology that provides data about executive function and semantic memory. Performance on the task is affected by conditions ranging from depression to dementia. The task involves participants naming as many members of a given category (e.g. animals) as possible in sixty seconds. Most of the analyses reported in the literature only rely on word count...

BACKGROUND There is evidence that alogia and formal thought disorder (FTD), two prominent speech symptoms in schizophrenia, are associated with different patterns of verbal fluency task deficits. Verbal fluency is thought to involve several cognitive mechanisms, including controlled retrieval, semantic memory, and context processing. METHODS The current research examined whether alogia and FT...

This study examined phonemic (letters), semantic (animals) and action verbal fluency cues in twenty-four patients with FRDA, and twenty matched healthy control subjects. The Action Fluency Test (AFT) is a newly-developed verbal fluency cue that consists in asking the subject to rapidly generate verbs. Given the high presence of dysarthria and cognitive slowness in FRDA patients, control tasks w...

Several investigations have suggested that age, education and culture affect semantic fluency. To date, there is no research work indicating whether there are differences among speakers of the same language but from different countries. It has been proposed that despite having the same language, each Spanish-speaking country should have its normative data. The purpose of this study was to analy...

This study examined the relationship between phonemic and semantic (category) verbal fluency and cognitive status in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer's Prevention (WRAP), a longitudinal cohort enriched for family history of Alzheimer's disease. Participants were 283 WRAP subjects (age 53.1[6.5] years at baseline); who had completed three waves of assessment, over ∼6 years and met psychometr...

Differences in semantic clustering and switching were examined in men with frontal lobe lesions, men with schizophrenia and healthy men. Men with frontal lobe lesions and men with schizophrenia generated fewer words than healthy men and presented intact clustering, but decreased switching during the semantic fluency task. However, after controlling for the number of words produced, between-grou...

Neurobiological models of depression point to brain regions that are proposed to be involved with both emotion regulation and language processing. This qualitative review focused on neurophysiological evidence for semantic processing and verbal fluency deficits associated with left frontal lobe and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex functioning in depression, respectively. Findings suggest that the...

BACKGROUND: Classical aphasiology, based on the study of stroke sequelae, fuses speech fluency and grammatical ability. Nonfluent (Broca's) aphasia often is accompanied by agrammatism; whereas in the fluent aphasias grammatical deficits are not typical. The assumption that a similar relationship exists in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) has led to the dichotomization of this syndrome into flu...

INTRODUCTION Peripheral arterial disease, as measured by the ankle-brachial index (ABI), is prevalent among the elderly, and is associated with functional performance, assessed by the 6-minute walk test (6MWT). Executive cognitive function (ECF) impairments are also prevalent in this population, but no existing study has investigated the association between ECF and functional performance in an ...