Department of Psychology and Human Development, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, London, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of York, UK.
Int J Speech Lang Pathol. 2024 Apr;26(2):257-266. doi: 10.1080/17549507.2023.2214711. Epub 2023 Jun 19.
Semantic fluency is potentially a useful tool for vocabulary assessment in children with vision impairment because it contains no visual test stimuli. It is not known whether in the primary school years children with vision impairment perform more poorly on semantic fluency tasks compared to their sighted peers.
We compared semantic fluency performance of two groups of 5- to 11-year-old British English speaking children-one group with vision impairment and one without. We also investigated within-group differences in performance, based on severity of vision impairment. We administered one category (animals) to children with vision impairment ( = 45) and sighted children ( = 30). Participants had one minute to respond. Responses were coded for accuracy, error type, clusters, and switches.
Correct responses increased with age within each group. Groups did not differ significantly on any outcome measure. Severity of vision impairment did not impact task performance.
Results suggested that semantic fluency performance-at least for the category animals-is not different in children with vision impairment compared to sighted children. Findings also suggest that semantic fluency could be a suitable addition to the tools that speech-language pathologists use to assess language abilities in children with vision impairment.
语义流畅性可能是评估视力障碍儿童词汇能力的有用工具，因为它不含视觉测试刺激。目前尚不清楚在小学阶段，视力障碍儿童在语义流畅性任务上的表现是否比他们视力正常的同龄人差。
我们比较了两组 5 至 11 岁的英国英语儿童的语义流畅性表现，一组有视力障碍，一组没有。我们还根据视力障碍的严重程度，调查了组内的表现差异。我们向 45 名视力障碍儿童和 30 名视力正常儿童发放了一种类别（动物）的任务。参与者有一分钟的时间作答。反应的准确性、错误类型、聚类和转换都被编码。
每个组内的正确反应都随年龄的增加而增加。两组在任何结果测量上都没有显著差异。视力障碍的严重程度并没有影响任务表现。
结果表明，与视力正常的儿童相比，视力障碍儿童的语义流畅性表现（至少对于动物类别）没有差异。研究结果还表明，语义流畅性可以作为言语语言病理学家评估视力障碍儿童语言能力的工具的补充。
