Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Aug 1.
Published in final edited form as: Cognition. 2010 May 15;116(2):155–167. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.04.007

Table 2.

Examples of good and poor performance on verbal fluency. Switches between subcategories are calculated as the number of switches weighted by cluster size, such that a switch after a cluster of two items is awarded 1 point, after a cluster of three items, 2 points, and so forth. In the good performance example, the child would receive a switch score of 8 (switching after 7 zoo animals, 2 aquatic animals, and 2 pets, and finishing with 2 reptiles), while in the poor performance example, the child would receive a switch score of 0 (a single zoo animal cluster, with no switches). While coding of semantic subcategories is necessarily somewhat subjective, inter-rater reliability was high (>.85 for all pairs of raters, across all three experiments)

Good Performance Example Poor Performance Example
Word Time Word Time
Lion 0:01 Elephant 0:01
Zebra 0:04 Jaguar 0:02
Elephant 0:05 Jaguar (repeat) 0:11
Hippo 0:07 Lion 0:29
Rhinoceros 0:10 Tiger 0:30
Giraffe 0:11 Elephant (repeat) 0:46
Tiger 0:22
Turtle 0:30
Fish 0:39
Cat 0:42
Dog 0:44
Lizard 0:46
Snake 0:58