Semantic fluency in primary school-age children with vision impairment

Semantic fluency is potentially a useful tool for vocabulary assessment in children with vision impairment because it contains no visual test stimuli. It is not known whether in the primary school years children with vision impairment perform more poorly on semantic fluency tasks compared to their sighted peers.

We compared semantic fluency performance of two groups of 5- to 11-year-old British English speaking children-one group with vision impairment and one without. We also investigated within-group differences in performance, based on severity of vision impairment. We administered one category (animals) to children with vision impairment (n = 45) and sighted children (n = 30). Participants had one minute to respond. Responses were coded for accuracy, error type, clusters, and switches.

Correct responses increased with age within each group. Groups did not differ significantly on any outcome measure. Severity of vision impairment did not impact task performance.

Results suggested that semantic fluency performance-at least for the category animals-is not different in children with vision impairment compared to sighted children. Findings also suggest that semantic fluency could be a suitable addition to the tools that speech-language pathologists use to assess language abilities in children with vision impairment.