title: Switching and clustering in verbal fluency tasks throughout childhood.
abstract: An analysis of switching and clustering in fluency tasks was conducted on data from 180 Hebrew speakers aged 8-29. On the phonemic task, total output, number of switches, and number of clusters differed significantly across age groups and increased with age, whereas mean cluster size did not. On the semantic task, all measures increased with age. No differences were found between adolescents and adults on the phonemic variables, but adults provided more switches on the semantic task than did adolescents. The results suggest that the development of word retrieval might be more dependent on maturation of executive search strategies than on lexical enrichment.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Disorders, Tel Aviv University, Tel Hashomer, Israel 52621. gkave@012.net.il
authors.forename: Gitit
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kave
authors.forename: Sharon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kigel
authors.forename: Rotem
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kochva
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult