The present study examined the phenotypic and genetic relationship between fluency and non-fluency-based measures of reading and mathematics performance. Participants were drawn from the Western Reserve Reading and Math Project, an ongoing longitudinal twin project of same-sex MZ and DZ twins from Ohio. The present analyses are based on tester-administered measures available from 228 twin pairs...

Category and letter fluency tasks have been used to demonstrate psychological and neurological dissociations between semantic and phonological aspects of word retrieval. Some previous neuroimaging and lesion studies have suggested that category fluency (semantic-based word retrieval) is mediated primarily by temporal cortex, while letter fluency (letter-based word retrieval) is mediated primari...

In a community-dwelling sample (N = 4,790; age range 14-94), we examined whether personality traits prospectively predicted performance on a verbal fluency task. Open, extraverted, and emotionally stable participants had better verbal fluency. At the facet level, dispositionally happy and self-disciplined participants retrieved more words; those prone to anxiety and depression and those who wer...

We examined the effect of a teaching method on skill fluency and on-task endurance of a 9-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. An academic task that occurred at low fluency during 10-min baseline sessions was taught to fluency. When responding was not yet fluent, brief reversals to baseline showed that the learner's rate of responding decreased and ...

this study examined the effects of task complexity on written narrative production under different task complexity conditions by efl learners at different proficiency levels. task complexity was manipulated along robinson’s (2001b) proposed task complexity dimension of here-and-now (simple) vs. there-and-then (complex) in. accordingly, three specific measures of the written narratives were targ...

Students may avoid working on difficult tasks because it takes them longer to complete those tasks, which results in a delay to reinforcement. Research studies show that reinforcer and response dimensions can be manipulated within a concurrent operants framework to bias choice allocation toward more difficult tasks. The current study extends previous literature on concurrent choice assessments ...

Sentence fluency is an important component of overall text readability but few studies in natural language processing have sought to understand the factors that define it. We report the results of an initial study into the predictive power of surface syntactic statistics for the task; we use fluency assessments done for the purpose of evaluating machine translation. We find that these features ...

Patients with schizophrenia show deficits across a broad spectrum of neurocognitive domains. In particular, deficits in verbal fluency are common. Verbal fluency tests are neuropsychological tests that assess frontal lobe function or executive function but also assess divergent thinking. However, few studies have considered the impairment of verbal fluency from the viewpoint of divergent thinki...

In a meta-analysis of 135 studies involving 6000 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 6057 healthy controls, we examined the relative degree of semantic and phonemic fluency impairment in AD patients. The effect size for semantic fluency (d=2.10: 95%CI 2.22-1.97) was significantly larger than for both phonemic fluency (d=1.46: 95%CI 1.56-1.36) and picture naming (d=1.54: 95%CI 1.66-1.40)....

The concepts of "good" and "bad" are associated with right and left space. Individuals tend to associate good things with the side of their dominant hand, where they experience greater motor fluency, and bad things with their nondominant side. This mapping has been shown to be flexible: Changing the relative fluency of the hands, or even observing a change in someone else's motor fluency, resul...