Development of a Chinese verbal fluency test for the Hong Kong psychiatric setting

Abstract

Verbal fluency assessment is commonly used to evaluate lexical and semantic stores as well as executive functions in patients with schizophrenia and different psychiatric illnesses. Given the considerable involvement of the language element in these types of verbal fluency test, it is likely that direct application of these tests to the Chinese context is not feasible. This is particularly true for the letter fluency test, which requires the participant to generate as many words as possible beginning with letters F, A, and S within 1 minute. The purpose of the present paper is to comment on the development of a new Chinese letter fluency test for local use. Two versions of the test are examined in this paper. The first requires participants to make up a traditional Chinese saying starting with a given word. The second test makes use of homophones: participants are given a single Chinese character and are instructed to give as many of its homophones as possible in 1 minute. It is intended that this review will add clarity to the future direction of studying a fluency test involving phonemic or orthographic cues in the local psychiatric setting.