Objective: The Children’s Verbal Fluency test (VF) is a neuropsychological test that measures executive function, vocabulary storage, and speed of mental processing. It has been increasingly used in the assessment of children in neurological and psychiatric disorders such as Batten disease, frontal lobe epilepsy, cerebellar tumor, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia. Ho...

Both creativity and schizotypy are suggested to be manifestations of the hyperactivation of unusual or remote concepts/words. However, the results of studies on creativity in schizophrenia are diverse, possibly due to the multifaceted aspects of creativity and difficulties of differentiating adaptive creativity from pathological schizotypy/positive symptoms. To date, there have been no detailed...

Prior work suggests that patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) often base their recognition memory decisions on familiarity. It has been argued that conceptual fluency may play an important role in the feeling of familiarity. In the present study we measured the effect of conceptual fluency manipulations on recognition judgments of patients with mild AD and older adult controls. "Easy" an...

BACKGROUND Verbal fluency relies on the coordinated activity between left frontal and temporal areas. Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) present phonemic and semantic fluency deficits. Recent studies suggest that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) enhances adaptative patterns of brain activity between functionally connected areas. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to assess ...

Background: Verbal fluency relies on the coordinated activity between left frontal and temporal areas.Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) present phonemic and semantic fluency deficits. Recent studiessuggest that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) enhances adaptative patterns of brain activitybetween functionally connected areas.Objective: The aimof this studywas ...

Previous research shows that pausing and disfluencies are common in non-native speech. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between fluency and pausing in Russian read-aloud speech of 12 Finnish university students and examine their fluency development during a 3.5-month study-period in Russia. To assess fluency, 30 Russian teachers rated the students’ speech samples (on a ...

Neuropsychological tests related to verbal fluency paradigms are among those most frequently used to assess executive functions in older adults. These tasks are quick and easy to administer and widely used for clinical assessment. However, despite their apparent simplicity, these tests involve different cognitive demands and are influenced by sociodemographic factors. Two cognitive domains are ...

A category specific effect in naming tasks has been reported in patients with Alzheimer's dementia. Nonetheless, naming tasks are frequently affected by methodological problems, e.g., ceiling effects for controls and "nuisance variables" that may confound results. Semantic fluency tasks could help to address some of these methodological difficulties, because they are not prone to producing ceil...

Previous research studies have shown that in adults, verbal fluency is impaired after lesion to the frontal lobes and left temporal lobe. More recently, there have been a few studies reported which indicated that in children, like adults, left hemisphere and frontal lesions result in pronounced effects on verbal fluency. The present study examined developmental differences in verbal fluency wit...

Investment personality traits are thought to positively affect cognitive performance in old age, even after controlling for prior cognitive ability. In the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 (N = 1,091), a cross-lagged model tested for reciprocal effects of the investment trait Intellect on verbal fluency, an indicator of crystallized intelligence, at age 70 and 73 years, while adjusting for general IQ ...