期刊名称：Journal of Indian Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health
电子版ISSN：0973-1342
出版年度：2011
卷号：7
期号：1
页码：13-18
出版社：Indian Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health
摘要：Background: Semantic fluency tasks are used in evaluating word retrieval in children. Inaddition to examining overall word output, semantic clustering is used to assess the strategicretrieval process involved during searching and retrieving exemplars from specifiedcategory.Limited research on analysis of word retrieval strategies in adolescents exists with respect toIndian context. Therefore, present study is an attempt to conduct qualitative analysis ofsemantic clustering in early and mid adolescence. Method:30 early and mid adolescent children aged 12 – 15 years were assessed on semanticfluency withparticipants instructed to generate as many words as possible belonging tospecific semantic categories (animal, food & vehicle) in one minutefor each category.Offline analysis of responses wasdone on total word output, semantic clusters and meancluster size. Mean & Standard deviation were obtained for the measures for each semanticcategory.Results: Total word output produced by adolescents for the animal, food and vehicle fluencytasks were 13.13, 12.4 & 10.2 respectively. Detailed qualitative analysis on clusteringrevealed specific & common rules of organization pattern in terms of clustering the wordoutput under semantic sub categories for each task. The average number of clusters and meancluster size produced by adolescent children were approximately 3.47 & 2.12 respectively. Conclusion:The present study revealedspecific clustering pattern on specific semanticcategories which does not reach adult like pattern of word retrieval. Routine evaluation ofsemantic clustering can provide additional insight into word retrieval strategies in adolescentswith developmental neurological conditions
关键词：Semantic clustering; Adolescence; Word retrieval strategy
