Verbal fluency: The right way to measure?

Abstract

Verbal Fluency is a means of measuring the ability of a person to organize their thinking. A population in which these problems in organization of thinking have been reported is Type 2 diabetes mellitus. Until now the most common way to measure Verbal Fluency was the total amount of words. It is argued that the total amount of words does not measure the processes underlying performance on Verbal Fluency. In the current study the database form the Utrecht Diabetic Encephalopathy study (UDES) was used and this time the performances of the 190 respondents were reviewed in a different way in order see if the underlying processes could be measured. Performances were reviewed by means of clustering, switching and time. Results show that the new means of measuring for both semantic and phonological fluency only shows differences after a period of time and that the new means of measuring does not correlate with neuropsychological tasks that measure memory and executive functioning.