Verbal fluency tests

Verbal fluency tests are a kind of psychological tests in which participants have to say as many words as possible from a category in a given time (usually 60 seconds). This category can be semantic, such as fruits, or phonetic, such as words that begin with letter p. Regarding the brain areas used in this task investigations have found an implication of both frontal and temporal areas, being the contribution of the first more important in the phonetic variant and the second with the semantic cue. Accordingly different neurological pathologies affecting these areas produce impairments in the task. For this reason they are commonly included in clinical neuropsychology batteries, but they have also been very used in neuroscience investigation.

Although the most common performance measure is the total number of words other analysis such as number of repetitions, number and length of clusters of words from the same semantic or phonetic subcategory or number of switches to other categories can be carried out.

The COWAT (Controlled oral word association test) is the most employed phonetic variant.