Verbal fluency test

[9][10] The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) administered the Animal fluency to over three thousand participants 60 years and older in 2011–2014.

[19] Accordingly, different neurological pathologies affecting these areas produce impairments (typically a reduction in the number of items generated) in one or both versions of the task.

This evidence suggests that the order in which words are produced in the fluency task will provide an indirect measure of semantic distance between the items generated.

[20][23] For instance, the figure on the right shows a hierarchical clustering analysis of animal semantic fluency data from 55 British schoolchildren aged 7–8.

[20] The analysis reveals that children have schematic organization for this category according to which animals are grouped by where they are most commonly seen (on the farm, at home, in the ocean, at the zoo).

Furthermore, hypotheses about the structure of the underlying semantic network have been formulated based on the temporal analysis of verbal fluency tasks by means of curve fitting.