A Pilot Study of Verbal Fluency in the Zulu Speaking Population with Preliminary Application to Traumatic Brain Injury

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.