Centre of Experimental Medicine, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia.
Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Assessment. 2023 Oct;30(7):2198-2211. doi: 10.1177/10731911221117512. Epub 2022 Aug 18.
Category and letter verbal fluency assessment is widely used in basic and clinical research. Yet, the nature of the processes measured by such means remains a matter of debate. To delineate automatic (free-associative) versus controlled (dissociative) retrieval processes involved in verbal fluency tasks, we carried out a psychometric study combining a novel lexical-semantic retrieval paradigm and structural equation modeling. We show that category fluency primarily engages a free-associative retrieval, whereas letter fluency exerts executive suppression of habitual semantic associates. Importantly, the models demonstrated that this dissociation is parametric rather than absolute, exhibiting a degree of unity as well as diversity among the retrieval measures. These findings and further exploratory analyses validate that category and letter fluency tasks reflect partially distinct forms of memory search and retrieval control, warranting different application in basic research and clinical assessment. Finally, we conclude that the novel associative-dissociative paradigm provides straightforward and useful behavioral measures for the assessment and differentiation of automatic versus controlled retrieval ability.
类别和字母流畅性评估在基础和临床研究中被广泛应用。然而，这些方法所测量的过程的本质仍然存在争议。为了描绘词汇流畅性任务中涉及的自动（自由联想）和受控（分离）检索过程，我们结合了一种新颖的词汇语义检索范式和结构方程模型进行了心理测量学研究。我们表明，类别流畅性主要涉及自由联想检索，而字母流畅性则对习惯性语义联想进行了执行抑制。重要的是，模型表明这种分离是参数性的而不是绝对的，在检索测量中表现出一定程度的统一性和多样性。这些发现和进一步的探索性分析验证了类别和字母流畅性任务反映了记忆搜索和检索控制的部分不同形式，这在基础研究和临床评估中具有不同的应用价值。最后，我们得出结论，新颖的联想-分离范式为自动与受控检索能力的评估和区分提供了直接而有用的行为测量方法。
