The Word Retrieval Fluency Test: what does it assess?

The term fluency in aphasia is ambiguous. It can relate to the rate of speech--normal vs. laborious or the ability to retrieve words. In this report, to avoid confusion we refer to fluency in a word retrieval task. Different authors have ascribed defective performance on these tasks to Frontal Lobe Syndrome or Aphasia. Our patient material adds dementia as a causative condition. To determine whether subnormal test performance is due to generalized brain dysfunction or only to left hemisphere disorders, we tested left hemisphere damaged patients, without aphasia as well as right hemisphere damaged patients, obtaining non-significant differences between the two groups. This supports our experience that such a test is highly sensitive to generalized brain dysfunction i.e. to a variety of cerebral disorders and therefore seems not to be highly pathognomonic of aphasia.