Semantic Verbal Fluency Test

Verbal fluency tests are a kind of psychological test in which participants have to produce as many words as possible from a category in a given time (usually 60 seconds). This category can be semantic, including objects such as animals or fruits, or phonemic, including words beginning with a specified letter, such as p, for example.

The semantic fluency test is sometimes described as the category fluency test or simply as “freelisting”. The COWAT (Controlled oral word association test) is the most employed phonetic variant.

Although the most common performance measure is the total number of words, other analyses 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.