Semantic fluency in primary school-age children with vision impairment

Abstract

Purpose

Semantic fluency is potentially a useful tool for vocabulary assessment in children with vision impairment because it contains no visual test stimuli. It is not known whether in the primary school years children with vision impairment perform more poorly on semantic fluency tasks compared to their sighted peers.

Method

We compared semantic fluency performance of two groups of 5- to 11-year-old British English speaking children—one group with vision impairment and one without. We also investigated within-group differences in performance, based on severity of vision impairment. We administered one category (animals) to children with vision impairment (n = 45) and sighted children (n = 30). Participants had one minute to respond. Responses were coded for accuracy, error type, clusters, and switches.

Result

Correct responses increased with age within each group. Groups did not differ significantly on any outcome measure. Severity of vision impairment did not impact task performance.

Conclusion

Results suggested that semantic fluency performance—at least for the category animals—is not different in children with vision impairment compared to sighted children. Findings also suggest that semantic fluency could be a suitable addition to the tools that speech-language pathologists use to assess language abilities in children with vision impairment.

Keywords:

• vision impairment
• blindness
• semantic fluency
• vocabulary
• children
• primary-school

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the children and families who participated in this project.

Ethical approval

The project received ethical approval from UCL Institute of Education Research Ethics Committee.

Patient consent statement

All participants and their parents gave written consent and verbal assent to anonymised/depersonalised data being presented in this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data generated for this study will not be made publicly available. The ethics form states that only processed data will be presented in manuscripts. Data are not available to maintain anonymity and confidentiality of participants.

Notes

1 In total, 10 phonological clusters were coded. Within the VI group, six phonological clusters were coded, whereby four participants produced one phonological cluster and one participant produced two phonological clusters. Within the sighted group, four phonological clusters were coded, whereby two participants produced one phonological cluster and one participant produced two phonological clusters. Therefore, our findings are consistent with the literature demonstrating the rarity of phonological clusters in the semantic fluency task.

2 The Shapiro-Wilk test just crossed the threshold of normal distribution. To be conservative, we also ran non-parametric Mann-Whitney U tests and the pattern of results was identical. We therefore present just the results of the t-tests here.

Additional information

Funding

The parent project (Hayton et al., 2021), under which these data were collected, was funded by the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant SRG18R1/181296.