Verbal Fluency Measures in Persons with Type II Diabetes

Abstract

Diabetes is a very common condition with high prevalence rates. Prolonged diabetes is known to induce complications concerning retinal, renal, cardio vascular and peripheral nervous systems. Complications of diabetes in regard to cognitive and cognitive linguistic processing has been studied by many researchers in the recent years. Verbal fluency measures are very simple to test and are time economic. The present study aimed to measure verbal fluency measure (category fluency and phonemic fluency skills) on diabetics (group 1 participants) and non diabetics (group 2 participants). Five lexical categories were used to tap categorical fluency skills, while three letters were used to tap phoneme fluency skills. It was found that mean scores were higher for non diabetics compared to diabetics and there was statistically significant difference seen between the two groups evident on Mann Whitney U test. Verbal fluency skills tapping divergent retrieval would have been affected in persons with diabetes; this would also reflect the cognitive-linguistic detioration in this population.