Control ejecutivo y fluidez verbal en población infantil: Medidas cuantitativas, cualitativas y temporales

verbal fluency tests (vfts) are considered semantic cognitive tasks. they demand the retrieval of words under different semantic, phonologic, and grammatical conditions. the measures most commonly used to assess word recall in vfts are: (1) the number of words produced, (2) categorical and phonological association between words, (3) switching between clusters, and (4) the time at which the words are evoked. these measures involve quantitative (1), qualitative (2 and 3), and temporal (4) analyses. in this study, semantic and phonological vfts were administered to a child population (8-12 years) in granada (spain), in order to: (1) review traditional vft measures, (2) update temporal indices, and (3) introduce combinations, in an effort to more precisely establish the role of executive control. topics widely-discussed in the literature include two crucial cognitive processes that underlie vft performance: semantic processing and executive control, which have been associated with activity in temporal and frontal brain regions, respectively. one of the major challenges in the study of these processes is to distinguish between their separate contributions to vft execution using obtained data. measures of switching and clustering have traditionally been used to this end, however they do not take into account the time at which the words are evoked. these measures have also been criticized because their final scores are interrelated and exposed to biases difficult to control. considering temporal measures important, we evaluated the role of five executive control variables (attentional control, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, switching, and sustained control) and their relationship with combined quantitative, qualitative and temporal measures. time variables were included by placing each word evoked on a sixtysecond timeline of verbal production. this way we were able to simultaneously calculate the clustering and switching of words, and their temporal positions.