The main goal of this study was to produce adjusted normative data for the Portuguese population on two verbal fluency measures: the semantic fluency test (animals category) and the phonemic fluency test (letters M, R, and P). The study included 950 community-dwelling individuals (624 women and 326 men) aged between 18 and 98 (mean = 57.8, SD = 19.0), who had educational backgrounds ranging fro...

This study investigated the role of oral reading fluency in second language reading. Two hundred and fifty-five high school students in South Korea were assessed on three oral reading fluency (ORF) variables and six other reading predictors. The relationship between ORF and other reading predictors was examined through an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Next, the contribution of ORF to silen...

Disproportionately greater deficits in semantic relative to phonemic verbal fluency are seen in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and have been attributed to neurodegenerative changes in the temporal lobe. Amnestic (AMN) mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which often represents incipient AD, is also characterized by early temporal lobe neuropathology, but previous comparisons of verbal fluency between AD ...

A fundamental part of growing up is going beyond routines. Children become increasingly skilled over the first years of life at actively maintaining goals in the service of flexible behavior, allowing them to break out of habits and switch from one task to another. Their early successes often occur with exogenous (externally-provided) goals, and only later with endogenous (internally-driven) go...

Collaborative fluency is the coordinated meshing of joint activities between members of a well-synchronized team. We aim to build robotic team members that can work side-byside humans by displaying the kind of fluency that humans are accustomed to from each other. As part of this effort, we have developed a number of metrics to evaluate the level of fluency in human-robot shared-location teamwo...

Many studies have found that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) perform significantly worse than normal controls on verbal fluency tasks. Moreover, some studies have found that AD patients' deficits compared to controls are more severe for semantic fluency (e.g., vegetables) than for letter fluency (e.g. words that begin with F). These studies, however, have not taken category size into acc...

Verbal fluency tests are employed regularly during neuropsychological assessments of older adults, and deficits are a common finding in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Little extant research, however, has investigated verbal fluency ability and subtypes in preclinical stages of neurodegenerative disease. We examined verbal fluency performance in 107 older adults with amnestic mild cogni...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES With increasing numbers of people with limited English proficiency in the United States, there is growing concern about the potential adverse effect of language barriers on patient care. We sought to compare the non-English language fluency of practicing physicians by physician race/ethnicity and location of medical school education. METHODS We used cross-sectional a...

Second language (L2) research often involves analyses of acoustic measures of fluency. The studies investigating fluency, however, have been difficult to compare because the measures of fluency that were used differed widely. One of the differences between studies concerns the lower cut-off point for silent pauses, which has been set anywhere between 100 ms and 1000 ms. The goal of this paper i...