Performance of Children in Phonemic and Semantic Verbal Fluency Tasks

Abstract

This study investigated the performance of children from the Brazilian Northeast region, from 7 to 10 years in phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks. The participants were 102 subjects (62 girls and 40 boys) who performed three phonemic and three semantic fluency tasks. The results were submitted to correlational and variance analysis to investigate the influence of the variables age and gender on the subjects performance. There was no effect of gender on the results. Significant contrasts between age groups were found, and better performance was observed on phonemic tasks. Also, the performance in this task changed along development, in contrast to what happened with the semantic fluency. The findings seem to be in accordance to neurodevelopmental aspects, taken into account that explicit memory systems show more precocious maturational course, with earlier consolidation, in comparison to the executive functions and frontal lobes, which go on developing until adult ages.

Performance of northeastern children from public schools on phonological and semantic verbal fluency tasks

“…This evidence follows the trend of previous studies. ( BRUCKI;ROCHA, 2004;CHARCHAT-FICHMAN;SILVA, 2011;HAZIN;COL, 2016;HELENO, 2006;KOREN;KOFMAN;BERGER, 2005;LEITE;COL, 2016;MALLOY-DINIZ;COL, 2007;NIETO;COL, 2008;RIVA;NICHELLI;DEVOTI, 2000. ).…”

“…However, the findings are consistent with recent studies, which point to age as one of the main variables influencing performance in VPT, as a result of neurocognitive maturational processes. (DIAMOND, 2013;HAZIN;COL, 2016;LEITE;COL, 2016;COL, 2012).…”

“…Both tests must meet universal scoring criteria. The relevance of these tests in the field of clinical neuropsychology has been accompanied by efforts to develop national and regional normative samples by several Brazilian research groups (CHARCHAT-FICHMAN;SILVA, 2011;HAZIN;COL, 2016;LEITE;COL, 2016;MALLOY-DINIZ;COL, 2007;BRUCKI;ROCHA, 2004).…”

“…OLIVEIRA; SILVA, 2011;HAZIN;COL, 2016;LEITE;COL, 2016). The results found indicated an increase in children's performance with advancing age and were compatible with previous studies with Brazilian and international samples (KOREN; KOFMAN;BERGER, 2005;MALLOY-DINIZ;COL., 2007;NIETO;COL, 2008;RIVA;NICHELLI;DEVOTI, 2000;SAUZÉON;COL, 2004;).…”

Habilidades preditoras da leitura e escrita em escolares do 1º e 2º ano do Ensino Fundamental I

“…Outra habilidade que apresentou êxito em identificar escolares em processo de alfabetização com dificuldade de aprendizagem foi a fluência verbal fonológica. Esse componente da fluência verbal é responsável em recuperar a informação pelo som e tem seu período maturacional concretizado na vida adulta (Zamo & Salles, 2013;Leite et al, 2016). Estudos indicam que crianças com dislexia apresentam prejuízos em testes de fluência verbal fonológica devido à característica diagnóstica de déficit fonológico da linguagem (Michelino et al, 2017).…”