Dil Konuşma ve Yutma Araştırmaları Dergisi

Yazarlar: Şevket ÖZDEMİR, Aylin Müge TUNÇER

Konular:-

Anahtar Kelimeler:Semantic fluency,Action fluency,Education,Age,Gender

Özet: Introduction: Verbal fluency measures involving semantic and action fluency are frequently used by neuropsychologists and speech and language therapists in linguistic and/or cognitive assessment. Both of these fluency measures are implemented through noun or verb categories produced within a limited time period following certain verbal clues presented. Being fast and quick, these measures are included in the neuropsychological test batteries that are used to diagnose a wide array of diseases and/or disorders. It is observed that “Animals” and “Supermarket” categories are frequently used in semantic fluency measures (Ardila, OstroskySolis, and Bernal, 2006; Tröster et al., 1995). A special importance to semantic fluency measures is attached as it is mentioned that due to the impairment in the semantic memory among Alzheimer’s patients, the performance derived out of these patients help clinicians differentiate this type of dementia from others. Being a more recent type of measure, action fluency involves producing as many verbs as possible during the task (Piatt, Fields, Paolo, and Tröster, 1999a). It is said that action fluency measures could be performed to carry out executive function assessment among healthy individuals, while it also holds potential to distinguish Parkinson’s patients having a concomitant Alzheimer’s disease from those that do not have it (Piatt et al., 1999a; 1999b; Signorini and Volpato, 2006). There are variables that are said to influence these measures: Cognitive variables (that include verbal memory and executive functions), neuro-anatomic variables, demographic variables (that widely include education, age, and gender) (Casals-Coll et al., 2013; Clark et al., 2014; Pihlajamäki et al., 2000;Shao, Janse, Visser, and Meyer, 2014; Stokholm, Jorgensen, and Vogel, 2013).The aim of this article is to examine the semantic and action fluency performance during 1.5 minutes. “Breakfast Items, Famous People, Food, Beverages, Household Items” categories were selected for semantic fluency measurement. As for action fluency, “Saying things people do” were requested from participants. Furthermore, the influence of demographic variables (education, age and gender) were examined. Method: 150 Turkish-speaking participants whose age ranged from 15 to 81 participated in the study. Informed consent was taken from all the participants and the study received the approval of the Ethical Committee of Anadolu University. During the implementation all the participants followed the same order of categories at one sitting. Along with the consent of all the participants, voice recordings were taken and these were listened by the researchers of the study to determine the words produced during the task. The data gathered were analyzed through descriptive and inferential methods. Results and discussion: Regarding the mean values across age groups, it was observed the highest and lowest values were obtained from 15-17 and 60 and above age groups respectively. Previous studies mostly confirmed the effect of age on the performance (Cavaco et al., 2013; Egeland, Landrİ, Tjemsland, and Walbækken, 2006; Ito, Hatta, Ito, Kogure, and Watanabe, 2004; Khalil, 2010). It was also mentioned that there might be category-specific differences in the performance as no significant difference was observed among “Household Items, Food and Breakfast Items”. In the education variable it was also seen the highest mean values were attained by the participants receiving education lasting for 12 years and more. Moreover, the lowest mean values were observed among participants engaging in 1-8 years of education. The influence of education was widely articulated in previous studies that both measure semantic and action fluency (Alfimova, 2010; Piatt, Fields, Paolo, and Tröster, 2004; Stokholm et al., 2013). As for the gender, female participants were observed to produce higher mean number of words in “Breakfast Items and Food” categories, which was statistically significant. As previous studies reported inconsistent results on the influence of gender variable, it was stated that the differences found in these categories could imply effective use of word retrieval strategies, autobiographical experience, cultural differences (Egeland et al., 2006; Tallberg, Ivachova, Jones-Tinghag, and Östberg, 2008). Lastly, production differences between categories were examined, total production frequencies and first five response rates were calculated for each category. These were especially carried out in order to derive word lists that could be used during speech and language assessment and therapy sessions for aphasia and other neurologic language disorders

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