Semantic verbal fluency in two contrasting languages.
This cross-linguistic study investigated Semantic Verbal Fluency (SVF) performance in 30 American English-speaking and 30 Finnish-speaking healthy elderly adults with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Despite the different backgrounds of the participant groups, remarkable similarities were found between the groups in the overall SVF performance in two semantic categories (animals and clothes), in the proportions of words produced within the first half (30 seconds) of the SVF tasks, and in the variety of words produced for the categories. These similarities emerged despite the difference in the mean length of words produced in the two languages (with Finnish words being significantly longer than English words). The few differences found between the groups concerned the types and frequencies of the 10 most common words generated for the categories. It was concluded that culture and language differences do not contribute significantly to variability in SVF performance in healthy elderly people.
Department of Speech Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. seija.pekkala@helsinki.fi
Seija
S
Pekkala
Mira
M
Goral
Jungmoon
J
Hyun
Loraine K
LK
Obler
Timo
T
Erkinjuntti
Martin L
ML
Albert
D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D013060:Speech; D014825:Vocabulary