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PURPOSE: Verbal fluency, a task frequently employed in neuropsychological assessment, provides important word productivity data but little information about subjective effort associated with demand monitoring and resource allocation. In two experiments, this study investigated the effects of task variables (semantic vs. phonemic cues; alternating vs. nonalternating conditions) and personal factors (fear of negative evaluation and trait anxiety) on subjective effort for a wide variety of verbal fluency tasks in neurotypical individuals. METHOD: Twenty-one adults completed eight verbal fluency tasks in Experiment 1. The tasks were selected to examine effort reported for verbal fluency that differed in (a) cue types and (b) the disruptions of clustering strategies. In Experiment 2, a separate group of 50 adults completed two verbal fluency tasks twice in separate sessions. Participants also completed social-emotional measures including fear of negative evaluation and trait anxiety. Working memory was assessed as a control variable. RESULTS: Experiment 1 showed greater effort for completing semantic than phonemic cue tasks and greater effort for alternating than nonalternating conditions. Alternating semantic verbal fluency yielded the greatest effort among all tasks. Differences in effort could not be accounted for by performance alone. Experiment 2 showed that greater fear toward negative evaluation was associated with greater effort. The relationship between fear and effort was not related to trait anxiety or moderated by performance levels or repeated testing. CONCLUSIONS: Knowledge about factors that impact subjective effort in neurotypical individuals is fundamental to accurate interpretation of effort reported by clinical populations. This study demonstrated the multifaceted nature of subjective effort that could not be accounted for by performance alone. In addition to task variables, effort assessment needs to consider the impact of social-emotional factors such as fear toward negative evaluation.
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Señales (Psicología) , Conducta Verbal , Adulto , Miedo , Humanos , Pruebas Neuropsicológicas , SemánticaRESUMEN
OBJECTIVE: Native speakers frequently outperform non-native speakers on classic semantic verbal fluency tasks that target concrete non-emotional word retrieval. Much less is known about performance differences in retrieval of emotional words, which are abstract and crucial to social-emotional competence. This study compared native and non-native speakers' verbal productivity on emotional and non-emotional verbal fluency tasks. METHOD: Forty-seven native and 37 non-native speakers of English participated in the study. Participants completed seven semantic verbal fluency tasks in English including classic semantic (e.g., "animals"), action (e.g., "things people do"), and emotional variants (e.g., "things that make people happy"). Subjective and objective measures of English proficiency, information about language usage, and cognitive measures (working memory) were obtained for each participant. RESULTS: Verbal productivity for classic semantic, action, and emotional verbal fluency was lower for non-native speakers. Smaller language-specific vocabulary in non-native speakers did not moderate positivity biases in emotional verbal fluency. Subjective and objective language proficiency measures were less predictive of performance on the emotional than the non-emotional verbal fluency tasks. CONCLUSION: Non-native speakers perform more poorly than native speakers on semantic verbal fluency in English for both emotional and non-emotional variants. Positivity biases are not moderated by language proficiency and are reliable features of emotional verbal fluency. Proficiency measures may be less effective in predicting generation of emotional than neutral words.
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Lenguaje , Semántica , Emociones , Humanos , Pruebas Neuropsicológicas , Conducta Verbal , VocabularioRESUMEN
OBJECTIVE: The happy-sad task adapts the classic day-night task by incorporating two early acquired emotional concepts ("happy" and "sad") and demonstrates elevated inhibitory demands for native speakers. The task holds promise as a new executive function measure for assessing inhibitory control across the lifespan, but no studies have examined the influence of language of test administration on performance. METHOD: Seventy adult native English speakers and 50 non-native speakers completed the computerized day-night and the new happy-sad tasks administered in English. In two conditions, participants were categorized pictorial stimuli either in a congruent manner ("happy" for a happy face) or in a more challenging, incongruent manner ("sad" for a happy face). Lexical decision performance was obtained to estimate levels of English language proficiency. RESULTS: Native speakers and non-native speakers performed comparably except for the critical incongruent condition of the happy-sad task, where native speakers responded more slowly. A greater congruency effect for the happy-sad task was found for native than for non-native speakers. Lexical decision performance was associated with performance on the challenging incongruent conditions. CONCLUSION: This study reinforced the usefulness of the happy-sad task as a new measure in evaluating inhibitory control in adult native-speakers. However, the language of test administration needs to be considered in assessment because it may lead to performance differences between native and non-native speakers.
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Emociones , Función Ejecutiva , Adulto , Humanos , Lenguaje , Pruebas del Lenguaje , Pruebas NeuropsicológicasRESUMEN
Purpose Emotional verbal fluency (Emo-VF) has the potential to expand neuropsychological assessment by providing information about affective memory retrieval. The usability of Emo-VF is limited, however, by significant variations in task administration and the lack of information about Emo-VF responses. This study investigated verbal productivity and the lexical-semantic properties of responses on positive and negative Emo-VF tasks. Comparing Emo-VF to non-Emo-VF tasks used regularly in neuropsychological assessment provided additional information about the basic characteristics of Emo-VF tasks. Method Twenty-five adult native speakers provided verbal responses to three Emo-VF ("happy," "sad," "negative emotions") and two non-Emo-VF categories ("animals," "things people do"). Verbal productivity was measured at the word and syllable levels. Multiple large-scale data corpora were used to estimate the lexical-semantic properties of the verbal responses. Results There was a robust positivity bias in verbal productivity within Emo-VF tasks. Emo-VF tasks tended to elicit longer words than "animals" and "things people do," which might impact the results of verbal productivity analyses, especially in comparisons with "things people do." Within Emo-VF tasks, negative Emo-VF elicited words from a wider range of valence than positive Emo-VF tasks. Similarities (e.g., word length and complexity) and differences (e.g., concreteness, age of acquisition) were found between positive and negative Emo-VF tasks. Conclusions The study provided information about the basic characteristics of Emo-VF tasks, which included evidence for a robust positivity bias, suggestions for analyses of verbal productivity (e.g., consideration of word length), and lexical-semantic properties associated with positive and negative Emo-VF tasks using corpora data.
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Emociones , Semántica , Memoria , Pruebas Neuropsicológicas , Conducta VerbalRESUMEN
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) leads to a wide array of behavioral and cognitive deficits. Individuals with TBI often demonstrate difficulties with the recognition and expression of emotion communicated through multiple modalities including facial expression, vocal prosody, and linguistic content. Deficits in emotional communication contribute to a pattern of social pragmatic communication problems, leading to decreased psychosocial function. Growing evidence supports intervention targeting affective processing. This article summarizes the current evidence for evaluation and treatment of affective processing disorders in TBI.
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Lesiones Traumáticas del Encéfalo/diagnóstico , Trastornos de la Comunicación/diagnóstico , Emociones , Afecto , Concienciación , Lesiones Traumáticas del Encéfalo/complicaciones , Lesiones Traumáticas del Encéfalo/rehabilitación , Trastornos del Conocimiento/diagnóstico , Trastornos del Conocimiento/rehabilitación , Terapia Combinada , Trastornos de la Comunicación/rehabilitación , Formación de Concepto , Humanos , Relaciones Interpersonales , Ajuste SocialRESUMEN
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to compare the performance of bilingual speakers on an emotional verbal fluency task to category and letter verbal fluency tasks. A second purpose was to compare performances on these tasks to language proficiency ratings. METHOD: Twelve verbal fluency tasks were administered to 21 Spanish-English bilingual speakers. Results were analyzed for differences between fluency types (category, letter, and emotional) and languages (English and Spanish). RESULTS: Participants generated the most items in category fluency tasks and the least items in emotional fluency tasks. The number of items generated for letter and emotional fluency tasks were not significantly different, but both were significantly lower than the number of items generated in category fluency. More items were generated for positive emotions than for negative emotions. Differences between languages for category and letter fluency tasks were significantly correlated with differences in language proficiency ratings, but this finding was not found for emotional fluency tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Self-ratings of proficiency and language dominance correlated significantly with performance on category and letter fluency tasks and may be useful predictors of differences between languages on these tasks. Emotional fluency was not significantly correlated with language proficiency ratings, suggesting that performance on emotional fluency may be more significantly affected by emotional processing ability. The emotional verbal fluency task has potential as a component of neuropsychological evaluations to screen easily and quickly for emotional processing deficits, including those associated with traumatic brain injury and depression. Additionally, results support a positivity bias in language and cognition processes.
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Emociones , Multilingüismo , Medición de la Producción del Habla/estadística & datos numéricos , Conducta Verbal , Adulto , Femenino , Humanos , Lenguaje , Masculino , Pruebas Neuropsicológicas , Encuestas y Cuestionarios , Adulto JovenRESUMEN
PURPOSE: To investigate the hypothesis that vowel production is more variable in adults with acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) relative to healthy individuals with unimpaired speech. Vowel formant frequency measures were selected as the specific target of focus. METHOD: Seven adults with AOS and aphasia produced 15 repetitions of 6 American English vowels in /hVC/ context (hid, head, hat, hot, hub, hoot). Vowel formant frequency measures (F1, F2) were Bark transformed and compared with data from archival sources. RESULTS: Measures of vowel acoustics in speakers with AOS did not differ from those of unimpaired speakers, including absolute Bark formant values, vowel space area, intervowel distance, and individual trial-to-trial formant variability. CONCLUSION: Comparison with normative acoustic measures suggested that vowel production at the word level is unimpaired in the current speakers with AOS, supporting previous studies that have shown vowel production is relatively intact in AOS.
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Apraxias , Fonética , Acústica del Lenguaje , Trastornos del Habla , Voz , Anciano , Análisis de Varianza , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Persona de Mediana Edad , Reproducibilidad de los Resultados , Medición de la Producción del HablaRESUMEN
UNLABELLED: Changes in consonant and syllable-level error patterns of three children diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) were investigated in a 3-year longitudinal study. Spontaneous speech samples were analyzed to assess the accuracy of consonants and syllables. Consonant accuracy was low overall, with most frequent errors on middle- and late-developing sounds. Omissions and substitutions were the dominant error types. Analysis of syllables revealed higher frequencies of error on complex mono- and polysyllables. Multiple regression analyses revealed that consonant accuracy is predicted by syllable shape accuracy and polysyllable frequency. Improvement was noted over time, although irregular patterns of consonant and syllable-level errors persisted across the period studied. Findings suggest that consonant errors in CAS are related to syllable-level deficits, namely difficulty constructing syllabic frames for speech production targets. LEARNING OUTCOMES: On the basis of this article, the reader will be able to (1) describe the deficits in consonant production demonstrated by the participants, (2) analyze the relationship between consonant production and syllable-level patterns of error and (3) consider the value of addressing syllable construction as a therapeutic goal.
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Apraxias/fisiopatología , Desarrollo del Lenguaje , Fonética , Trastornos del Habla/fisiopatología , Factores de Edad , Apraxias/complicaciones , Niño , Preescolar , Diagnóstico Diferencial , Humanos , Estudios Longitudinales , Masculino , Análisis de Regresión , Acústica del Lenguaje , Trastornos del Habla/etiología , Medición de la Producción del HablaRESUMEN
Vowel inventories and error patterns for three children with suspected developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) were analysed over a 3-year period using phonetic transcriptions of connected speech samples. The children demonstrated complete English vowel inventories except for rhotics. However, accuracy of vowel targets in connected speech did not normalize during this period. No consistent patterns of vowel errors were found. There was no decrease in vowel accuracy with increased utterance length or syllable complexity. Findings indicate persistence of vowel inaccuracy in the presence of a relatively complete vowel inventory. This longitudinal data can help to build consensus on use of vowels as a potential clinical marker for differential diagnosis of DAS.
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Apraxias/diagnóstico , Fonética , Pruebas de Articulación del Habla , Apraxias/terapia , Niño , Preescolar , Terapia Combinada , Equipos de Comunicación para Personas con Discapacidad , Diagnóstico Diferencial , Disartria/diagnóstico , Disartria/terapia , Humanos , Terapia del Lenguaje , Estudios Longitudinales , Masculino , Medición de la Producción del Habla , Logopedia , Resultado del TratamientoRESUMEN
Variability in the speech production patterns of children with developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) was investigated in a three-year longitudinal study of three children with DAS. A metric was developed to measure token-to-token variability in repeated word productions from connected speech samples. Results suggest that high levels of total token and error token variability and low levels of word target stability and token accuracy characterize the disorder. Overall levels of variability and patterns of change over time differed between participants. Longitudinal patterns were indicative of decreasing total token variability and increasing token accuracy. However, change was not consistently unidirectional for two of the three children in the study, suggesting day-to-day performance differences in addition to within-session variability.
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Apraxias/complicaciones , Trastornos de la Articulación/fisiopatología , Trastornos de la Articulación/etiología , Preescolar , Humanos , Estudios Longitudinales , Masculino , Medición de la Producción del HablaRESUMEN
UNLABELLED: Three children with developmental apraxia of speech (DAS) identified the number of syllables in words, judged intrasyllabic sound positions, and constructed syllable shapes within monosyllabic frames. Results suggest that DAS children demonstrate an apparent breakdown in the ability to perceive "syllableness" and to access and compare syllable representations with regard to position and structure. Based on these findings, DAS is viewed as a disorder characterized by an impoverished phonological representation system. LEARNING OUTCOMES: On the basis of this article, the reader will be able to (1) describe the deficits in syllabic perception demonstrated by some participants with DAS; (2) examine the utility of metalinguistic tasks in the differential diagnosis of DAS; and (3) evaluate the findings with respect to competing theoretical perspectives on DAS.