Comparing Senior Academics and Students in Phonemic Verbal Fluency: Phonetic and Word Frequency Variables

Introduction: Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) is a common neuropsychological assessment tool used to evaluate an individual’s semantic and phonemic verbal fluency. The defining feature of this test is the imposed time limit (typically 60 s per task) and the initial letter constraints. Evaluating the performance on COWAT has been challenging because numerous factors may complicate the interpretation of the obtained results. Although it has been widely used in clinical and research settings, it remains unclear whether COWAT performance primarily depends on the current cognitive activity level, the participants’ age or the complexity and richness of vocabulary (which might be revealed via linguistic means, e.g., a relationship between pause length and word frequency). Methods: The paper compares the performance of two age groups on the Russian version of COWAT test: students (M = 18.4, SD = 0.8) and senior academics (M = 60.6, SD = 5.2), all native speakers of Russian. Here, we develop the commonly used quantitative approach to processing data by adding the qualitative variables of word frequency and pause length. Results: Our findings show that the cohort of senior academics tends to outperform the younger cohort, which might be conditioned by constant extensive cognitive engagement potentially preventing any cognitive decline. Second, associations between word frequency and pause length, mediated by certain factors, were observed in both cohorts studied, which call for a more in-depth and larger scale investigation. Conclusion: The research opens new avenues for applying COWAT as a comprehensive diagnostic tool and a research method in both psychology and linguistics.