Original Research
A Pilot Study of Verbal Fluency in the Zulu Speaking Population with Preliminary Application to Traumatic Brain Injury
South African Journal of Communication Disorders | Vol 46, No 1 | a723 |
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/sajcd.v46i1.723
| © 2020 Terri-Leigh Sperinck, Janet de Picciotto
| This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 16 April 2020 | Published: 31 December 1999
Submitted: 16 April 2020 | Published: 31 December 1999
About the author(s)
Terri-Leigh Sperinck, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, University of the Witwatersrand, South AfricaJanet de Picciotto, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Full Text:
PDF (738KB)Abstract
This study investigated the semantic verbal fluency (VF) abilities of non-neurologically impaired (NNI) Zulu speaking subjects in order to obtain normative data for this population. The data were analysed in terms of the total number of words generated in one minute, the number of words generated over four fifteen-second time periods and the strategies employed. Where possible, these results were compared to performance of South African English speaking NNI subjects. The responses of three traumatically brain injured (TBI) Zulu speaking subjects on VF tasks were obtained and compared to the NNI subjects. The NNI subjects performed significantly poorer than the current norms and poorer than the South African English speaking population. The TBI subjects generated fewer words than the NNI subjects. The strategies used by the TBI subjects were similar in type but were less efficiently used than the Zulu speaking NNI subjects. The results of this study are particularly relevant to the clinical role of speech pathologists in the multicultural and multilingual population of South Africa.
Keywords
verbal fluency; semantic verbal fluency; multicultural; multilingual
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