Assessment of the verbal fluency skills in Turkish speaking children ranging in age from 7 to 14

Verbal fluency tests are included in almost every neuropsychological evaluation and they are sensitive to cognitive impairment from a variety of etiologies. Semantic and phonemic fluency tasks are exemplary clinical ways to tap into semantic and phonological processes central to speech production. This study was aimed to assess verbal fluency skills in Turkish speaking children ranging in age from 7 to 14. Another aim of the study was to investigate the differences in verbal fluency performance by age and gender. Verbal fluency skills were assessed with semantic fluency tasks (animals, fruits and vegetables, vehicles, furniture, body parts and clothing), phonemic fluency tasks (/a/, /b/, /e/, /f/, /k/, /p/, /r/, /ü/, /z/) and action verbal fluency tasks (saying things that people do).Data were collected in a sample of 128 volunteer students (65 girls, 63 boys) selected from 4 public elementary schools in Eskişehir city center. Participants were divided into 8 age groups (7 years, 8 years, 9 years, 10 years, 11 years, 12 years, 13 years, and 14 years). Any child with a known history of psychiatric, neurological or developmental diseases was not included in the study.Results indicated that the verbal fluency skills improved with age in children. Girls and boys were found not to perform significantly different on the verbal fluency tasks. Verbal fluency tasks were analyzed for the average number of items generated by participants and found that phonemic fluency performance was significantly lower than semantic and action verbal fluency, but no significant differences were found between the semantic fluency and action verbal fluency performance. When the data were analyzed for the total and average number of words, participants were found to produce more words in the category of body parts in semantic fluency tasks, and in /k/ phoneme in phonemic fluency tasks. The analysis of the number of different words did not change the priority of /k/ phoneme among phonemic fluency tasks; yet, animals among semantic fluency tasks became the most familiar category with more different words.Keywords: verbal fluency, semantic fluency, phonemic fluency, action verbal fluency, Turkish speaking children