Switching and clustering in verbal fluency tasks throughout childhood

Abstract

An analysis of switching and clustering in fluency tasks was conducted on data from 180 Hebrew speakers aged 8–29. On the phonemic task, total output, number of switches, and number of clusters differed significantly across age groups and increased with age, whereas mean cluster size did not. On the semantic task, all measures increased with age. No differences were found between adolescents and adults on the phonemic variables, but adults provided more switches on the semantic task than did adolescents. The results suggest that the development of word retrieval might be more dependent on maturation of executive search strategies than on lexical enrichment.

The authors wish to thank Naomi Barancik, Yael Leventhal, Amos Raber, Orly Shoshani, and Diana Tsimkin for their help in data collection. Thanks are also extended to Sara Eyal for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.