Browsing by Author "Kaila, Elisabet"

Semantic fluency task is often used as part of an assesment to investigate children’s lexical development. Semantic fluency task measures the ability to generate words within a certain category and within a restricted amount of time. In previous studies, children’s semantic fluency skills have increased as the child grows. In addition, word retrieval strategies have been found to enhance word recall in the semantic fluency task with school-aged children and adults. However, there is only little knowledge regarding the use of word retrieval strategies in the semantic fluency task with preschool aged children. So far, in previous studies word retrieval strategies in the task have not been investigated with children under the age of 4. The aim of this study was to examine whether there are differences in 2 to 5 year old children’s performance in the semantic fluency task and whether children’s gender or their parent’s socioeconomic status had an impact on their performance. In addition, the children’s ability of using word retrieval strategies were explored and the relation between the use of word retrieval strategies and the number of correct words were evaluated. The study sample included 79 children. Children completed two semantic fluency tasks guided by their parents in an online questionnaire. During the tasks, the children generated words belonging to the semantic category of animals and clothes within a minute. The performance was evaluated on the basis of the number of correct words, errors and error types. Word retrieval strategies were studied by examining clusters, semantic subcategories and switches between subcategories. The results of this study showed that age had a strong relation to performance on fluency tasks as measured with a number of correct words, clusters, semantic subcategories and switches. The new result was that even 2 year old children could generate correct words for the task and utilize word retrieval strategies in the tasks. The children’s gender or parents’ socioeconomic status had no effect on performance in the semantic fluency tasks. Number of clusters, semantic subcategories and switches had a positive relation to the number of correct words which indicated that successful word retrieval required use of fluency strategies even with preschool aged children. However, due to the lack of previous research data, more research regarding children’s word retrieval strategies is necessary. This study is the first in which the children’s word fluency task was guided by their parents. Clinical practice and further studies could benefit from these results that such a research design would appear to be suitable for assessing children’s semantic fluency.