title: Changes in semantic fluency across childhood: Normative data from Australian-English speakers.
abstract: Verbal fluency tests are often used as part of an assessment battery to investigate children's lexical knowledge as well as executive function skills. To date, however, issues surrounding consistency of measurement cloud comparisons across studies, with the developmental performance of Australian-English speaking children also currently lacking. This study tracked verbal fluency development as measured by two semantic fluency tasks that included coding of fluency, clustering and switching type responses.
  
  
  
  Participants included 355 typically developing Australian-English speaking children (4-10 years) and 46 young adults. Total fluency was determined by the number of words produced for each category (Animals or Food), minus repetitions and rule violations. Semantic clusters (words generated within a subcategory) were coded while switches between single words or subcategories were differentiated and coded as either hard or cluster switches.
  
  
  
  Fluency showed consistent improvement over age. Cluster Switches and Hard Switches showed some evidence of a plateau in performance relative to fluency, but in opposite direction. Other measures showed no strong trends over age. Results were similar for both semantic categories.
  
  
  
  Our results highlight the rich information available within a semantic fluency task and the importance of differentiating hard and cluster switches in paediatric samples.
authors.affiliation: a Discipline of Speech Pathology , The University of Sydney , Lidcombe , Australia.
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Chami
authors.affiliation: a Discipline of Speech Pathology , The University of Sydney , Lidcombe , Australia.
authors.forename: Natalie
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5870-6378
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Munro
authors.affiliation: a Discipline of Speech Pathology , The University of Sydney , Lidcombe , Australia.
authors.forename: Kimberley
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9996-7235
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Docking
authors.affiliation: a Discipline of Speech Pathology , The University of Sydney , Lidcombe , Australia.|b Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the DeLTA Center , University of Iowa , Iowa City , IA , USA , and.
authors.forename: Karla
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-0612-0057
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: McGregor
authors.affiliation: a Discipline of Speech Pathology , The University of Sydney , Lidcombe , Australia.
authors.forename: Joanne
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-7467-9939
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Arciuli
authors.affiliation: a Discipline of Speech Pathology , The University of Sydney , Lidcombe , Australia.
authors.forename: Elise
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9973-5925
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Baker
authors.affiliation: c Discipline of Behavioural and Social Sciences in Health , The University of Sydney , Sydney , Australia.
authors.forename: Rob
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2089-0752
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Heard
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001315:Australia; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D013066:Speech-Language Pathology / Q000379:methods*; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Semantic fluency; children; normative data; typical development