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A cross-linguistic comparison of verbal fluency tests
Mónica Rosselli1, Alfredo Ardila, Judy Salvatierra
1Florida Atlantic University, College of Liberal Arts, Division of Psychology, 2912 College Avenue, Davie, Florida 33314, USA.
The International Journal of Neuroscience
|September 28, 2002
Summary
Bilinguals showed fewer semantic fluency words but similar phonemic fluency compared to monolinguals. Language background impacts word retrieval strategies.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Linguistics
Background:
- Oral fluency is a key measure of language production.
- Understanding how bilinguals and monolinguals retrieve words is crucial for psycholinguistics.
- Crosslinguistic influences on verbal fluency are not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compare oral fluency strategies in Spanish-English bilinguals and monolinguals.
- To investigate the effect of phonemic (alphabetical) versus semantic cues on word retrieval.
- To analyze the use of grammatical versus content words and the relation between productivity and semantic organization.
Main Methods:
- Eighty-two older adults (monolinguals and bilinguals) participated.
- Oral verbal fluency was assessed using phonemic (F, A, S) and semantic (animals) category tasks.
- Word production, grammatical word use, and semantic associations were analyzed.
Main Results:
- English and Spanish monolinguals performed similarly on phonemic tasks.
- Bilinguals produced fewer words than English monolinguals in semantic tasks, but not phonemic tasks.
- English monolinguals produced more grammatical words than Spanish monolinguals; bilinguals produced more grammatical words in English.
Conclusions:
- Bilinguals' semantic fluency is affected by language background, while phonemic fluency remains comparable.
- Crosslinguistic differences influence word recall strategies, particularly for grammatical words.
- Semantic organization strategies appear consistent across languages and proficiency levels.
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