Mengel, Kyle (2015) Effects of Practice and Priming on Semantic Verbal Fluency. Honours thesis, University of Southern Queensland. (Unpublished)
Abstract
This research investigated people’s ability to access and retrieve lexical knowledge from semantic memory. This ability is commonly assessed in clinical and neuropsychological settings via standardised tests of verbal fluency. Verbal fluency tests have a long history of providing high diagnostic utility and are particularly sensitive to brain damage and the cognitive changes associated with a range of clinical disorders. Extensive amounts of research have examined the impact that various neuropathologies have on verbal fluency performance and the particular types of performance deficits and difficulties that these conditions manifest. One area of research that had seemingly been overlooked concerned whether performance on verbal fluency tests can be improved. The broad aim of the current research was to investigate the basic research question ‘Can verbal fluency performance be improved?’ The specific approach and primary goal of the present study was to examine the influence that practice effects and a semantic priming task had on the semantic verbal fluency performance of healthy adults. Sixty participants aged between 19 – 74 years (M = 37.62, SD = 16.40) were administered verbal fluency tests in a pretest / intervention / posttest control group design. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three intervention groups, which involved an experimental semantic priming condition, an active control group and a passive control group. It was predicted that the semantic priming task would facilitate the subsequent retrieval of semantic items and significantly improve verbal fluency performance over and above practice effects. A 3-way mixed ANOVA was run to determine the impact that practice effects, semantic priming and group level contributed to verbal fluency performance. A significant main effect for practice was found F(1, 57) = 34.20, p <.001, p2 = .38, indicating that more words were produced posttest. The predicted effect of semantic priming was not supported. There was no significant main effect or interaction effects found for the independent variable of priming. The main implications of the study were that healthy unimpaired adults may already perform at a cognitive level that semantic priming does not significantly enhance in terms of their verbal fluency ability.
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| Item Type: | Thesis (Non-Research) (Honours) |
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| Item Status: | Live Archive |
| Additional Information: | Current UniSQ staff and students can request access to this thesis. Please email research.repository@unisq.edu.au with a subject line of SEAR thesis request and provide: Name of the thesis requested and Your name and UniSQ email address |
| Faculty/School / Institute/Centre: | Historic - Faculty of Health, Engineering and Sciences - School of Psychology and Counselling (1 Jan 2015 - 31 Dec 2021) |
| Supervisors: | Gerry Tehan |
| Qualification: | Bachelor of Science (Honours) |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Sep 2025 01:27 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Sep 2025 01:27 |
| Fields of Research (2008): | 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1799 Other Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 179999 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences not elsewhere classified |
| Fields of Research (2020): | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5299 Other psychology > 529999 Other psychology not elsewhere classified |
| URI: | https://sear.unisq.edu.au/id/eprint/52577 |
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