Differential Performance on Noun- and Verb-Verbal Fluency Tasks in People with Aphasia

Objectives: Verbal fluency tasks are widely administered to people with aphasia (PWA) as they are simple to administer and assess cognitive and linguistic abilities. This study aimed to analyze the noun and verb retrieval abilities of PWA and cognitively healthy adults (CHA) through noun and action (verb) fluency tasks. Methods: A total of 40 participants (20 CHA and 20 PWA) completed noun and action fluency tasks. The noun fluency task was conducted using the “animals” category from a semantic verbal fluency task. This study compared group performances across task types and examined demographic and cognitive variables predicting noun-verb dissociation. Additionally, the study analyzed which items significantly predicted each group for on noun and action fluency task. Results: PWA demonstrated significantly lower accuracy in both tasks compared to CHA. Both groups showed significantly lower accuracy in action fluency than in noun fluency. In PWA, education significantly predicted the noun-verb dissociation. In the noun fluency task, 8 words, including “cheetah,” and in the action fluency task, 18 words, including “come,” were identified as significant items for discriminating between the two groups. Conclusion: Unlike previous studies suggesting that PWA experience greater difficulty retrieving verbs than nouns, this study found similar differences between noun and verb fluency across groups. This result is likely due to the action fluency task not requiring controlled verb types, which may have obscured the specific difficulty in verb retrieval. These findings suggest that verbal fluency tasks are a useful tool for assessing lexical retrieval characteristics in PWA.