Finally, we expected variables related to lexical access ability to be relatively more important for category fluency performance than for letter fluency performance and, conversely, variables related to executive control ability to be relatively more important for letter fluency than for category fluency performance.
The study was carried out with 82 participants 30 men 1 whose mean age was Seventeen participants were aged between 60 and 69 years, 36 between 70 and 79 years, and 8 between 80 and 89 years. All participants were Dutch native speakers with normal or corrected-to-normal vision and only two of them were bilingual speakers. Their visual acuity was tested using a Landolt chart. All participants scored above 1. All participants were presented with the tasks in the following order: picture naming, verbal fluency, operation span, and stop-signal task.
Their vocabulary was tested in a different session, in the context of another study Janse and Adank, ; Scharenborg and Janse, ; Janse and Jesse, All participants provided informed consent before the experiment and their data were analyzed anonymously.
The educational background of participants was expressed on a scale from 1 primary school education to 6 university education.
On each trial, participants were asked to overtly generate as many Dutch words as possible within 60 s. First, category fluency was assessed in two trials: participants were asked to produce words in the animal category and then in the food and drink category. Letter fluency was assessed in the next two trials: participants were first asked to produce words that start with the letter M and then with the letter S.
Each new trial was triggered when participants pressed the space bar. Then the category or letter was presented in the center of the screen with a horizontal white bar on the bottom of the screen. The white bar represented an hourglass as it shrunk during 1 min until it disappeared. Participants were asked to avoid producing names of people or places and repetitions of words. Repetitions of the same word and proper names of people and places were excluded from the data analysis.
The total number of words was calculated for each trial and for each participant and was then averaged separately for the category and letter fluency tasks mean category and letter fluency score hereafter. The timing of the responses was analyzed following Luo et al.
Specifically, we computed the onset of the first word retrieved in a trial 1st RT and the mean of the time interval between the onset of the first retrieved word and each subsequently retrieved word hereafter mean subsequent RT. As shown by Luo et al. According to Rohrer et al. A short subsequent RT indicates a fast decline rate in retrieval speed. One hundred and sixty-two line-drawings of objects were used for the naming task. All pictures were adapted from an English naming battery Druks and Masterson, and had been used in an earlier study with Dutch speakers Shao et al.
The frequency of the object names covered a broad range log frequency 0—3. The dominant names of the pictures were the names used by the majority of the participants in the present study. All pictures were scaled to fit into frames of 4 by 4 cm on the participant's screen 2. The procedure followed Shao et al. Then a picture was shown for ms, followed immediately by a red flashing exclamation mark that was presented for maximally ms.
Participants were encouraged to name the pictures before the onset of the red exclamation mark but had the full 2 s interval to respond. The intertrial interval was ms. A trial ended when the voice key was triggered by the participant's verbal response or automatically 2 s after picture onset if the participant did not respond.
Four pseudo-randomized testing lists were used, which were counterbalanced across participants. Naming RTs were recorded online using a voice key and were manually checked later using the speech analysis program Praat Boersma, Responses were coded as errors when participants used names different from the dominant names of the pictures, or when the responses included a repair or started with a stutter or a filler word e. Errors were excluded from the data analysis. The operation span task was adapted from Shao et al.
Sixty mathematical operations and words translated into Dutch were used as in Shao et al. On each trial, a fixation cross was presented for ms followed by a blank interval of ms. Participants were required to write down the remembered words in the sequence they were presented. The task was self-paced. The operation-span score was calculated as the sum of words that were recalled in the right order on trials with correct responses to the mathematical operation.
A participant's score could range from 0 to To assess the ability to inhibit responses, we used the stop-signal task Stop-it Verbruggen et al. The visual stimuli were a square 1. The auditory stimulus was a Hz tone lasting for 75 ms. The output volume of the computer speaker was set to a fixed loud and clear presentation level. All visual stimuli were presented equally frequently in a random order.
The trial was terminated by a key press. On no-go trials, the tone was played as a stop signal shortly after the onset of the visual stimulus, indicating that the participant should withhold the response. The stop-signal delay SSD; i.
If the participant successfully inhibited the response on a given stop trial, the SSD in the next stop trial was increased by 50 ms, otherwise it was decreased by 50 ms. This increase or decrease of SSD was progressive and in principle the SSD could vary from 0 ms when responses on all previous stop trials were correctly inhibited to ms when responses on all previous stop trials failed to be inhibited. There was a practice block of 32 trials, followed by three test blocks of 64 trials each.
Following Verbruggen et al. Short SSRTs indicate good inhibitory control in that participants can stop their responses relatively late during response preparation. Vocabulary knowledge was assessed by a receptive multiple choice test Andringa et al. The proportion of correct items out of 60 was used to index participants' vocabulary knowledge.
This vocabulary test has not been standardized, but scores have been shown to predict general listening performance Janse and Jesse, and adaptation to a foreign-sounding artificial accent Janse and Adank, Furthermore, as part of a general Linguistic Knowledge construct, the scores have been shown to be the most important predictor of text comprehension in both native and non-native listeners Andringa et al.
Mean score, the 1st reaction time RT and subsequent RT in the category and letter fluency task, mean score and error rate of operation span task, stop-signal RT SSRT and mean RT of go trials of stop-signal task, mean naming RT, ex-Gaussian parameters and error rate of picture naming task. The RTs of the stop-signal task and the picture naming task were slower than those in the previous study testing students Shao et al.
The average vocabulary score in the present study was somewhat higher than the score obtained by Andringa et al. In order to examine the similarity between the category and letter fluency task performance, we correlated the three indicators mean score, 1st RT and mean subsequent RT across tasks. Age was related to most measures, except vocabulary size, which was only related to operation span.
Consistent with findings by Shao et al. Finally, we carried out multiple regressions to examine the independent contribution of each predictor to the prediction of verbal fluency performance. All predictors were entered into the model simultaneously. The dependent variables to be accounted for were the mean fluency scores, 1st RT, and average subsequent RT of the category and letter fluency task.
SSRT was not included because it was not related to any performance indicators of the verbal fluency tasks. Verbal fluency tasks are widely used to assess verbal functioning in clinical and research settings. This is because the tasks have compelling face validity: A person with a serious deficit in lexical access, executive control abilities or both will perform poorly in the tasks.
While fluency scores are useful indicators of general verbal functioning, it is for many purposes important to understand how strongly performance in the tasks is affected by each of the abilities involved.
They used category and letter fluency tasks and introduced different performance indicators: the number of correct responses, the RT to retrieve the first response 1st RT and the mean subsequent RT, which is the time when half of the responses have been given. As described above, they found that the three groups of participants did not differ in performance in the category fluency task.
However, in the letter fluency task, the high-vocabulary bilingual speakers had a higher mean score than the monolingual group and both groups of bilingual speakers had longer subsequent RTs than the monolingual speakers had.
These results support the view that bilingual speakers have better executive control ability than monolingual speakers cf. Whereas Luo and colleagues compared the performance of different groups of young participants, we tested one group of older participants and assessed how well their performance in the fluency tasks, measured in the same way as in the study by Luo et al.
We expected that good vocabulary knowledge and fast lexical access should be related to good performance in the fluency tasks. Good performance in the executive control tasks should also be related to good performance in the fluency tasks. In addition, we expected that lexical access ability should have a stronger impact on performance in the category fluency than in the letter fluency task, and, conversely, that executive control ability should have a stronger impact on performance in the letter fluency, compared to the category fluency task.
We will first consider the results of the analyses of correlations and then turn to the results of the regression analyses. In the raw correlations of the predictors with the indicators of the fluency performance, we found some support for the predictions laid out above.
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Free Learning from The Open University. Featured content. Free courses. All content. Verbal fluency Updated Tuesday, 4th January Here are some tests to measure your verbal fluency.
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