Examining qualitative and quantitative features of verbal fluency tasks to investigate the mental lexicon in postpartum women: A neuropsychological approach of executive functions applied to language

BARRAL PE; MIRANDA AR; CORTEZ MV; SCOTTA AV; SORIA EA

Psychology of Language and Communication

Sciendo

Lugar: Varsovia; Año: 2022 vol. 26 p. 450 - 492

During the postpartum period, women experience neurobiological and psychosocialvariations that impact language functioning. Word production in verbal fluency tasks(VFTs) is a cognitive indicator of associative (semantic categorization and phonologicalanalysis) and executive (inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility) processes. Also, alinguistic analysis allows for understanding production strategies (e.g., orthographic anduse of rhymes), with multivariate statistics facilitating cluster identification of the mostcommon words. Considering these approaches, this study aimed to optimize semantic andphonological VFT analysis for the identification of postpartum women's mental lexiconusing quantitative and qualitative scores. These outcomes were evaluated together withsociodemographic and reproductive data of 100 postpartum women (from Argentina).Mental lexicon description was statistically improved and showed that multiparouswomen clustered words more concisely than primiparous women, with increased correctwords and better organizational strategies. In sum, female reproductive history improvedVFT outcomes. The current results also show that factor analysis can optimize theneuropsychological study of language structuring.