Diagnostic utility of the thurstone word fluency test in neuropsychological evaluations

Abstract

Previous research has found that verbal associative fluency tasks are sensitive to the presence of cerebral lesions and more sensitive to frontal lobe and left hemisphere lesions than to other focal lesions. The present study investigated the diagnostic utility of the Thurstone Word Fluency Test (TWFT), a test of written verbal fluency, in detecting and localizing cerebral lesions. Using results from 203 brain-damaged and 134 normal subjects, we found that TWFT performance is affected by cerebral damage generally. At the same time, it is more impaired by frontal than by nonfrontal, by left than by right hemisphere, and by left frontal than by right frontal lesions. This test does not discriminate focal frontal from diffuse lesions. Stepwise discriminant function analyses indicated that the TWFT adds to the Halstead-Reitan Battery in discriminating focal frontal from nonfrontal lesions, but not in discriminating left hemisphere from right hemisphere lesions. Only markedly impaired TWFT performances had lateralizing significance.

Partly segregated cortico-subcortical pathways support phonologic and semantic verbal fluency: A lesion study

“…Of note, while the prominent role of left-hemispheric structure in verbal fluency is well known by clinicians for years, by including both left and right hemispheric patients our study provides direct evidence for this assumption (Benton, 1968;Pendleton et al, 1982;Martin et al, 1990;Ahola et al, 1996;Baldo and Shimamura, 1998;Stuss et al, 1998;Troyer et al, 1998;Szatkowska et al, 2000;Baldo et al, 2011;Robinson et al, 2012).…”

Acute Effects of Ketamine on Memory Systems and Psychotic Symptoms in Healthy Volunteers

“…The effect of ketamine on the semantic memory system has been investigated in tasks in which participants are required to generate category members (semantic fluency) or words beginning with a specified letter (phonemic fluency). Fluency is generally considered to be a measure of frontal lobe function (Pendelton et al, 1982). However, neuroimaging studies have consistently implicated activation in the left prefrontal cortices during fluency tasks, which are areas activated in tasks requiring semantic retrieval (see Buckner, 2001).…”

The role of prefrontal cortex in working-memory capacity, executive attention, and general fluid intelligence: An individual-differences perspective

“…However, frontal patients, particularly those with left-hemisphere damage, consistently perform significantly worse than do nonfrontal patients across 4-or 5-min recall periods (Guitton, Buchtel, & Douglas, 1985;Jones-Gotman & Milner, 1977;Milner, 1964;Pendleton, Heaton, Lehman, & Hulihan, 1982;Perret, 1974; but see Bolter, Long, & Wagner, 1983). These longduration fluency tasks should make considerable demands on selective attention and effortful memory search, as less dominant exemplars must be retrieved amid increasing interference from the already recalled, dominant exemplars.…”