Date of Award:

5-2002

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Psychology

Committee Chair(s)

David M. Stein (committee co-chair) JoAnn Tschanz (committee co-chair)

Committee

David M. Stein

Committee

JoAnn Tschanz

Committee

Susan L. Crowley

Committee

Carolyn Barcus

Committee

Bradley Axelrod

Committee

Hal Cain

Abstract

Alternating verbal fluency is a combination task that was designed to assess the cognitive constructs of verbal fluency and cognitive shifting, presumably for increased efficiency. Researchers and clinicians have hypothesized about the added diagnostic benefits and more sophisticated discriminability of alternating verbal fluency as compared with singular verbal fluency tasks.

To date there are no standardized forms of alternating verbal fluency tests, normed data, or a guide for differentiating patient populations. In addition, there are no published studies addressing the construct or concurrent validity of alternating verbal fluency with other tests of executive function. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine the construct validity of several tests of alternating verbal fluency in a sample of 106 subjects of mixed diagnoses. Specifically examined were the relationships between tests of alternating verbal fluency and several tests of executive function by examining bivariate correlations and conducting a principal components factor analysis. In addition, because researchers have found that age, years of education, and verbal ability have demonstrated considerable influence on the scores of other measures of executive function, particularly verbal fluency and cognitive shifting tasks, the relationship these demographic variables have on scores of alternating verbal fluency was examined.

Results of this study indicated similar correlational relationships between measures of traditional verbal fluency and alternating verbal fluency each with set shifting measures of executive function. Correlational results indicated that the measures were highly correlated to one another (r = .81). A factor analysis conducted with alternating verbal fluency, two measures of verbal fluency (the Category exemplar, a semantic verbal fluency task and the Controlled Oral Word Association Test, a phonemic verbal fluency task), and two measures of cognitive shifting (Wisconsin Card Sort Test and Trails B), suggested the presence of a single executive function/performance factor. The multiple regression analysis results indicated that age, years of education, and verbal comprehension accounted for 57% of the variance for alternating verbal fluency and 52% of the variance for traditional verbal fluency in this sample.

The results of this research provide support for construct and concurrent validity for the measure of alternating verbal fluency as a measure of executive functions. However, results also indicate that the task measures similar constructs to those assessed by traditional verbal fluency measures. Caution should be used when including this measure as a test of more than verbal fluency until further research is done to provide more information on the usefulness of this type of measure.

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