Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sung, Kyongje
• Gordon, Barry
• Yang, Sujeong
• Schretlen, David J.

Titel

Evidence of semantic clustering in letter-cued word retrieval

Ist Teil von

• Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology, 2013-01, Vol.35 (10), p.1015-1023

Ort / Verlag

Hove: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EBSCOhost Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Letter-cued word fluency is conceptualized as a phonemically guided word retrieval process. Accordingly, word clusters typically are defined solely by their phonemic similarity. We investigated semantic clustering in two letter-cued (P and S) word fluency task performances by 315 healthy adults, each for 1 min. Singular value decomposition (SVD) and generalized topological overlap measure (GTOM) were applied to verbal outputs to conservatively extract clusters of high-frequency words. The results generally confirmed phonemic clustering. However, we also found considerable semantic/associative clusters of words (e.g., pen, pencil, and paper), and some words showed both phonemic and semantic associations within a single cluster (e.g., pair, pear, peach). We conclude that letter-cued fluency is not necessarily a purely phonemic word retrieval process. Strong automatic semantic activation mechanisms play an important role in letter-cued lexical retrieval. Theoretical conceptualizations of the word retrieval process with phonemic cues may also need to be reexamined in light of these analyses.