Effects of Age, Gender and Education on Phonemic and Semantic Verbal Fluency.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to obtain normative data for Verbal Fluency Test and investigate the effects of age, gender, and education on verbal fluency in native Turkish-speaking individuals. METHOD A pilot study was conducted to determine 3 letters with differing levels of difficulty for completing the phonemic fluency task. First names and animals were chosen for the semantic fluency task, and an alternating semantic task (first name-animal) was also used. In total, 415 participants (208 male and 207 female) were recruited and stratified based on the age and education levels. RESULTS Level of education had a main effect on all verbal fluency tasks; people with higher education performed better. Age and gender were found to have no effect on phonemic verbal fluency. Only the < name production task was affected by gender, women performed better. Younger age groups produced more words in name generation and semantic alternating fluency tasks. CONCLUSION The effects of age, gender and education on verbal fluency are in accordance with many previous reports. Analysis of various errors were also conducted. Results for Turkish are presented and discussed in the light of literature.