Comparison of Verbal Fluency between Children with Learning Disabilities and Typically Developed Children

Naming disorder has largely been noted in Learning Disabilities (LD) by researchers. One of the aspects of naming which has been less considered in LD is verbal fluency. The current study aimed to explore verbal fluency among children with LD, to compare it with a control group, and to investigate the effect of demographic characteristics on it.
A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 30 children with LD (15 male and 15 female, aged: 8.90±1.20) diagnosed by psychiatrists and 30 age-, gender-, and grade-matched controls (15 male and 15 female, aged: 8.71±1.39). Each participant was individually asked to complete a verbal fluency task comprising of semantic and phonemic fluency.
The results revealed that the mean scores of semantic and phonemic fluency were significantly lower in the experimental group as compared to those of the control group (p0.05).
Thecurrent study demonstrated a general weakness of children with learning disability in verbal fluency. Improvement of verbal fluency with development in both groups can highlight the increasing role of reading experiments on the naming skill although gender did not show to have any effect. Considering the importance of naming and lexical skills in literacy, the present study showed the necessity for further and detailed study of verbal fluency in children with learning disabilities.