Exploration of Semantic Memory
Priming studies indicate that when a word or concept is activated in memory, and then spoken, it will activate other words or concepts which are associatively related or semantically similar to it. 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. Data from this semantic version of the task have therefore been the subject of many studies aimed at uncovering the structure of semantic memory, determining how this structure changes during normal development, or becomes disorganized through neurological disease or mental illness.
These studies generally make use of multiple fluency lists in order to make estimates of the semantic distance between pairs of concepts. Techniques such as multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering can then be used to visualize the semantic organization of the conceptual space. Such studies have generally found that semantic memory, at least as reflected by this test, has a schematic, or script-based, organization. whose core aspects may remain stable throughout life. For instance, the figure on the right shows a hierarchical clustering analysis of animal semantic fluency data from 55 British schoolchildren aged 7–8. 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). Children, adults, and even zoology PhD candidates, all show this same tendency to cluster animals according to the environmental context in which they are observed.
It has been proposed that the semantic memory organization, underlying performance in the semantic fluency test, becomes disordered as the result of some forms of neuropsychological disorder such as Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia, however, the evidence for this has been queried on theoretical and methodological grounds.
Read more about this topic: Verbal Fluency Test
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