SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.12 issue2Factorial validation of scale of attitudes toward leadership stylesValidation Study of the Need for Cognition Scale with a Portuguese sample author indexsubject indexarticles search
Home Pagealphabetic serial listing  

Avaliação Psicológica

Print version ISSN 1677-0471

Abstract

MOURA, Octávio; SIMOES, Mário R  and  PEREIRA, Marcelino. Semantic and phonemic verbal fl uency in children: cognitive functions and temporal analysis. Aval. psicol. [online]. 2013, vol.12, n.2, pp. 167-177. ISSN 1677-0471.

Verbal fluency tests are sensitive to different neuropsychological functions used in assessing the integrity of the frontal and temporal lobes. In this study, 120 healthy children (aged 7 to 10 years) were examined through a semantic and a phonemic verbal fluency test. The results of exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and correlation analysis seem to indicate that these two verbal fluency tests depend on different neurocognitive functions. The number of words produced in the phonemic task was significantly lower than the semantic task, indicating that is cognitively more complex. No gender differences were found, but a significant effect was observed for children’s age, showing the sensitivity of these verbal fluency tests to neurodevelopmental processes. The analyze of performance over the 60 seconds showed a significant production of words in the first 15 seconds and decrease over the remaining 45 seconds.

Keywords : semantic and phonemic verbal fluency; children; neuropsychology; BANC.

        · abstract in Portuguese | Spanish     · text in Portuguese     · Portuguese ( pdf )