Assessment of verbal fluency in Kurdish-Turkish bilingual adults

Bilingualism is one of the most important facts of today's world. In Turkey, which involves diversity of ethnic groups, 31 different languages are spoken as mother tongue. Accordingly, it is highly likely to encounter bilingual people in clinics or hospitals. This is why researches about bilingualism are of great value in Turkey. Kurdish is one of these 31 languages which is spoken almost all of the regions in the country. Verbal fluency assessments are widely used tests which are parts of neuro-psychological test battery. During tests, participant is given a task in which it is asked to count as many words as s/he can in a limited time. These words are expected to have certain characteristics. In semantic fluency task participant should name words that belong to a certain category such as, animals, fruits and so on. In phonemic fluency, the words are expected to start with a certain letter such as /f,a,s/. In action fluency, participant should count words that are about human's actions i.e. walking, kissing and so on. Aim of the recent study is assessing verbal fluency of Kurdish- Turkish bilinguals in Turkey. Participants are 85 individual who live in Van and Hakkari cities. Participants are divided into 3 different age and education level groups. Age groups are 18-29; 30-49 and 50 and over. And, education levels' groups are elementary, high school and university. In semantic fluency task participants are asked to produce words belong to animals, vegetables-fruits and actions categories. In phonemic fluency task for Kurdish /b,n,e/; for Turkish /k,f,r/ phonemes are selected. Participants are given 1 minute per each category and each phoneme. Assessment for each language is completed in at least one-day intervals. Results show that all participants have better verbal fluency performance in Turkish than Kurdish. Participants produce much more words in semantic and phonemic fluency tasks in Turkish compared to Kurdish. Participants have better performance in semantic fluency than phonemic fluency tasks in both languages. Another result obtained from study is that influence of education level on verbal fluency performance is significant. Another words, the higher the education level is, the more words participants can produce in verbal fluency tasks. There is not a significant difference found between participants' age groups and semantic-phonemic verbal fluency performances. In this study, words which participants produce for each language and each category-phoneme has been listed according to their frequency. Key Words: Kurdish, Turkish, bilingualism, semantic fluency, phonemic fluency, action fluency