Abstract
Letter-cued word fluency is conceptualized as a phonemically guided word retrieval process. Accordingly, word clusters typically are defined solely by their phonemic similarity. We investigated semantic clustering in two letter-cued (P and S) word fluency task performances by 315 healthy adults, each for 1 min. Singular value decomposition (SVD) and generalized topological overlap measure (GTOM) were applied to verbal outputs to conservatively extract clusters of high-frequency words. The results generally confirmed phonemic clustering. However, we also found considerable semantic/associative clusters of words (e.g., pen, pencil, and paper), and some words showed both phonemic and semantic associations within a single cluster (e.g., pair, pear, peach). We conclude that letter-cued fluency is not necessarily a purely phonemic word retrieval process. Strong automatic semantic activation mechanisms play an important role in letter-cued lexical retrieval. Theoretical conceptualizations of the word retrieval process with phonemic cues may also need to be reexamined in light of these analyses.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1015-1023 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology |
Volume | 35 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 1 2013 |
Keywords
- Clustering
- Cued-word retrieval
- Semantic system
- Switching
- Verbal fluency
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
- Clinical Psychology
- Neurology
- Clinical Neurology