Factors Predicting Mental Effort Associated With Verbal Fluency: Cue Types, Switching, and Fear of Negative Evaluation.

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.

Emotional and Non-Emotional Verbal Fluency in Native and Non-Native Speakers.

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.

Performance Differences Between Native and Non-Native Speakers on a New Happy-Sad Executive Function Measure.

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.

The Emotional Verbal Fluency Task: A Close Examination of Verbal Productivity and Lexical-Semantic Properties.

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.

Disorders of Emotional Communication in Traumatic Brain Injury.

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.

Category, Letter, and Emotional Verbal Fluency in Spanish-English Bilingual Speakers: A Preliminary Report.

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.

Vowel acoustics in adults with apraxia of speech.

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).

Consonant and syllable structure patterns in childhood apraxia of speech: developmental change in three children.

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.

Token-to-token variability in developmental apraxia of speech: three longitudinal case studies.

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.

The integrity of the syllable in developmental apraxia of speech.

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.