A cross-linguistic comparison of category and letter fluency: Mandarin and English

Verbal fluency tasks are widely applied in a variety of languages, but whether the quality and quantity of responses are comparable across structurally different writing systems is debatable. For example, since there are no letters in a logographic, non-alphabetic language such as Chinese, the mechanisms speakers use to generate a list of words in a letter fluency task might be structurally different than those used by speakers of alphabetic languages. In this study, we investigated lexical retrieval strategies and approaches in letter and category fluency tasks among monolingual Mandarin speakers compared to monolingual English speakers. We found that the responses of Mandarin speakers are both qualitatively and quantitatively different in letter fluency, and qualitatively different in category fluency. These results suggest that differences in task completion among non-English-speaking populations are important to consider when using this extensively utilised cognitive and linguistic measure in research and clinic.