Phonemic Fluency in Portuguese-speaking Subjects in Brazil: Ranking of Letters

Abstract

Phonological verbal fluency studies in English most commonly employ the letters F-A-S as stimuli. We assessed the production of words with these and 14 other letters in Portuguese-speaking healthy subjects (n = 74). The letters F-A-S were ranked among the easiest to produce words in one minute, which is consistent with the findings of studies with English-speaking subjects. There were differences in the overall ranking of letters depending on whether the total word number or the latency between words were considered. Our findings provide a databank of phonological verbal fluency performance using different stimuli in Portuguese, and demonstrate that the ranking of the letters F-A-S is comparable between the English and Portuguese languages in terms of the level of difficulty to produce words, when the task is used in its traditional format.

Evaluation of Stimuli for Development of the Indonesian Version of Verbal Fluency Task Using Ranking Method

“…For some languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, using FAS as stimuli gave similar results as in English (Rosselli et al, 2002). In addition, the ranking of letters FAS is comparable between English and Portuguese languages, in terms of the level of difficulty to produce words (Senhorini et al, 2006). While for other languages, such as French, the amount of produced words that begin with FAS is quite different compared to English (Steenhuis & Ostbye, 1995).…”

“…When our ranking was compared to the ranking of English version (Borkowski et.al., 1967) and the ranking of Portuguese version (Senhorini et al, 2006), we inferred that the positioning of the letters on all rankings are generally quite similar, except for the letters F, W, C, J, and K (see Table 5). Regarding FAS positioning as verbal fluency stimuli, all rankings agree that the letters A and S are positioned at the top ten high productive items.…”

“…Within these correlations, we could randomly choose any of them as a final ranking (see Table 2). However, since the previous research was based word familiarity and word occurrences (Borkowski et al, 1967;Senhorini et al, 2006), we decided to replicate these methods. Consequently, we have chosen the last ranking as ours.…”

“…Each group had eight orders of presentation to control practice and/or fatigue effects and each contained an equal number of easy and difficult letters, which were defined according to the weighted T-L frequency distribution. Senhorini et al (2006) made a list of more than three million occurrences of words in Portuguese and counted them on the basis of the number of words beginning with each letter of the alphabet. These data were gathered from extracts of conversations, monologues, lectures, interviews, and business meetings provided by researchers from the Department of Linguistics in one of the universities in Brazil.…”

BRBN-T validation: adaptation of the Selective Reminding Test and Word List Generation

“…In our opinion, these results provide important information for future studies with Portuguesespeaking subjects in terms of which letters should be used to produce words in a phonemic verbal fluency task. Likewise, the information which was obtained through the application of this methodology goes far beyond what would be achieved if only descriptive statistics were applied 32 . Despite the contribution of the present study to the psychometric procedures applied to neuropsychological assessment, there are some limitations that must be pointed out: the fact that is a convenience sample constituted only for healthy subjects who volunteered to participated in this test adaptation, although this neuropsychological battery is targeted to MS patients 33 , and the number of participants, particularly the number of participants per list of words (N = 22), restricted the use of IRT procedures to word analyses and selection.…”