Semantic and Action Fluency among Adolescents and Adults

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; Tr？ster 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 Tr？ster, 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; Pihlajam？ki 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