A meta-analytic review of verbal fluency performance following focal cortical lesions.

A meta-analysis of 31 studies with 1,791 participants was conducted to investigate the sensitivity of tests of verbal fluency to the presence of focal cortical lesions. Relative to healthy controls, participants with focal frontal injuries had large and comparable deficits on phonemic (r = .52) and semantic (r = .54) fluency. For frontal but not nonfrontal patients, phonemic fluency deficits qualified as differential deficits when compared with IQ and psychomotor speed; phonemic fluency was also more strongly and more specifically related to the presence of frontal lesions than the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test scores. In contrast, temporal damage was associated with a lesser deficit on phonemic fluency (r = .44) but a larger deficit on semantic fluency (r = .61).

[1]  A. Shimamura,et al.  Letter and category fluency in patients with frontal lobe lesions. , 1998, Neuropsychology.

[2]  D. Stuss,et al.  The frontal lobes are necessary for 'theory of mind'. , 2001, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[3]  M. Puel,et al.  Brain Functional Profiles in Formal and Semantic Fluency Tasks: A SPECT Study in Normals , 1996, Brain and Language.

[4]  T. Robbins,et al.  Dissociating executive mechanisms of task control following frontal lobe damage and Parkinson's disease. , 1998, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[5]  J. M. Warren,et al.  THE FRONTAL GRANULAR CORTEX AND BEHAVIOR , 1964 .

[6]  R. Varley,et al.  Lexical-semantic deficits following right hemisphere damage: evidence from verbal fluency tasks. , 1995, European journal of disorders of communication : the journal of the College of Speech and Language Therapists, London.

[7]  Arthur L. Benton,et al.  Word fluency and brain damage , 1967 .

[8]  C. F. List Doppelseitige Medianusneuritis bei Akromegalie , 1932, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde.

[9]  G. Winocur,et al.  Clustering and switching on verbal fluency: the effects of focal frontal- and temporal-lobe lesions , 1998, Neuropsychologia.

[10]  S. Salloway,et al.  Alteration of intention and self-initiated action associated with bilateral anterior cingulotomy. , 1999, The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences.

[11]  L L Thompson,et al.  Discriminability of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test using the standardization sample. , 1996, Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology.

[12]  E. Perret The left frontal lobe of man and the suppression of habitual responses in verbal categorical behaviour. , 1974, Neuropsychologia.

[13]  F. Maquart,et al.  Nerve Growth Factor Is Produced by Human Fibroblasts and Modulates Them: Role of Nerve Growth Factor in Tissue Repair , 2001, International Archives of Allergy and Immunology.

[14]  K. Meador,et al.  Effects of temporal lobectomy on generative fluency and other language functions. , 1994, Archives of clinical neuropsychology : the official journal of the National Academy of Neuropsychologists.

[15]  K. Laws A meta-analytic review of Wisconsin Card Sort studies in schizophrenia: general intellectual deficit in disguise? , 1999, Cognitive neuropsychiatry.

[16]  K. Lange,et al.  Verbal and figural fluency in patients with mass lesions of the left or right frontal lobes. , 1999, Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology.

[17]  Sophie Schwartz,et al.  Distinct patterns of word retrieval in right and left frontal lobe patients: a multidimensional perspective , 2001, Neuropsychologia.

[18]  D. M. Parker,et al.  A Handbook of Neuropsychological Assessment , 1992 .

[19]  T. Lloyd-Jones,et al.  A Selective Deficit for Living Things after Temporal Lobectomy for Relief of Epileptic Seizures , 2001, Brain and Language.

[20]  I. Whittle,et al.  Assessment of communication impairment and the effects of resective surgery in solitary, right-sided supratentorial intracranial tumours: a prospective study. , 1998, British journal of neurosurgery.

[21]  Ching-Yune C. Sylvester,et al.  Evidence for intact semantic representations in patients with frontal lobe lesions. , 2002, Neuropsychology.

[22]  Jeffrey P. Toth,et al.  Dissociation of attentional processes in patients with focal frontal and posterior lesions , 1999, Neuropsychologia.

[23]  A. Shimamura,et al.  Impaired use of organizational strategies in free recall following frontal lobe damage , 1995, Neuropsychologia.

[24]  M. Kendall Statistical Methods for Research Workers , 1937, Nature.

[25]  Cidambi Srinivasan,et al.  Combining Information: Statistical Issues and Opportunities for Research , 1993 .

[26]  P. Easterbrook,et al.  Publication bias in clinical research , 1991, The Lancet.

[27]  A. Benton,et al.  Journal of Clinical Neuropsychology , 1981 .

[28]  L. Thurstone,et al.  Factorial Studies Of Intelligence , 1941 .

[29]  M. Schlossberg The Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Test Battery: Theory and Clinical Interpretation. , 1986 .

[30]  T. Robbins,et al.  Planning and spatial working memory following frontal lobe lesions in man , 1990, Neuropsychologia.

[31]  C. Elger,et al.  Neuropsychological consequences of epilepsy surgery in frontal lobe epilepsy , 1998, Neuropsychologia.

[32]  D. Salmon,et al.  Semantic memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease: Failure of access or degraded knowledge? , 1992, Neuropsychologia.

[33]  Uta Frith,et al.  Theory of mind , 2001, Current Biology.

[34]  Sarah Crawford,et al.  The effects of anterior lesions on performance on a story comprehension test: left anterior impairment on a theory of mind-type task , 2000, Neuropsychologia.

[35]  R. Reitan,et al.  A selective and critical review of neuropsychological deficits and the frontal lobes , 1994, Neuropsychology Review.

[36]  D. P. Gaver,et al.  Combining Information: Statistical Issues and Opportunities for Research , 1993 .

[37]  G. Salvioli,et al.  Grammatical ambiguity resolution in right hemisphere-damaged patients: Evidence from an insertion task , 1996 .

[38]  Alex Martin,et al.  Word retrieval to letter and semantic cues: A double dissociation in normal subjects using interference tasks , 1994, Neuropsychologia.

[39]  Gregg B. Jackson,et al.  Meta-Analysis: Cumulating Research Findings Across Studies , 1982 .

[40]  M. Welsh,et al.  Towers of Hanoi and London: Contribution of Working Memory and Inhibition to Performance , 1999, Brain and Cognition.

[41]  P. Halligan,et al.  The effectiveness of rehabilitation for cognitive deficits , 2005 .

[42]  J. Crawford,et al.  Frontal lobe impairment in schizophrenia: relationship to intellectual functioning , 1993, Psychological Medicine.

[43]  H. Levin,et al.  The Psychological Construct of Word Fluency , 1997, Brain and Language.

[44]  S. Crowe,et al.  The Performance of Schizophrenic and Depressed Subjects on Tests of Fluency: Support for a Compromise in Dorsolateral Prefrontal Functioning , 1996 .

[45]  K I Taylor,et al.  Category fluency is also predominantly affected in Swiss Alzheimer's disease patients , 1997, Acta neurologica Scandinavica.

[46]  N. Stanhope,et al.  Frequency judgements of abstract designs by patients with diencephalic, temporal lobe or frontal lobe lesions , 1998, Neuropsychologia.

[47]  John E. Hunter,et al.  Correcting for sources of artificial variation across studies. , 1994 .

[48]  J. Crawford,et al.  Verbal fluency: a NART-based equation for the estimation of premorbid performance. , 1992, The British journal of clinical psychology.

[49]  Gregory P. Lee,et al.  The effects of lateralized temporal lobe dysfunction on normal and semantic word fluency , 1990, Neuropsychologia.

[50]  M. Albert,et al.  Perseveration in Aphasia , 1986, Cortex.

[51]  F. Craik,et al.  Comparison of older people and patients with frontal lesions: evidence from world list learning. , 1996, Psychology and aging.

[52]  A. Field Meta-analysis of correlation coefficients: a Monte Carlo comparison of fixed- and random-effects methods. , 2001, Psychological methods.

[53]  R. Butler,et al.  The effects of frontal brain impairment on fluency: Simple and complex paradigms. , 1993 .

[54]  W. J. Langford Statistical Methods , 1959, Nature.

[55]  A Capdevila,et al.  Frontal lobe activation during word generation studied by functional MRI , 1996, Acta neurologica Scandinavica.

[56]  C. J. Long,et al.  The utility of the Thurstone Word Fluency Test in identifying cortical damage. , 1983 .

[57]  K. Flowers,et al.  Some characteristics of word fluency in Parkinson's disease , 1995, Journal of Neurolinguistics.

[58]  D. Stuss,et al.  Organizational strategies with unilateral or bilateral frontal lobe injury in word learning tasks. , 1994 .

[59]  J. Fuster Frontal lobes , 1993, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[60]  E D Richardson,et al.  Assessment of frontal lobe functions. , 1994, The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences.

[61]  M. Mataró,et al.  Phonemic and semantic fluencies in traumatic brain injury patients with focal frontal lesions. , 2000, Brain injury.

[62]  Pierre Goulet,et al.  Word fluency after a right-hemisphere lesion , 1997, Neuropsychologia.

[63]  M. Cole The Frontal Granular Cortex and Behavior. , 1964 .

[64]  R B Ivry,et al.  Dissociable contributions of the prefrontal and neocerebellar cortex to time perception. , 1998, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[65]  R. Heaton,et al.  Diagnostic utility of the Thurstone Word Fluency Test in neuropsychological evaluations. , 1982, Journal of clinical neuropsychology.

[66]  J D Van Horn,et al.  A comparison of rCBF patterns during letter and semantic fluency. , 2000, Neuropsychology.

[67]  John R. Crawford,et al.  The Executive Decline Hypothesis of Cognitive Aging: Do Executive Deficits Qualify as Differential Deficits and Do They Mediate Age-Related Memory Decline? , 2000 .

[68]  Pierre Goulet,et al.  Criterion-specific reduction of verbal fluency in right brain-damaged right-handers , 1986, Neuropsychologia.

[69]  Patrick Rabbitt,et al.  Methodology of Frontal and Executive Function , 1999 .

[70]  K. Yanagisawa [Senile dementia of Alzheimer type]. , 1999, Ryoikibetsu shokogun shirizu.

[71]  L. Hedges,et al.  The Handbook of Research Synthesis , 1995 .

[72]  K. Greve,et al.  Assessment of executive function in patients with mild traumatic brain injury. , 1999, The Journal of trauma.

[73]  M. Mountain,et al.  Wisconsin card sorting test as a measure of frontal pathology: A review , 1993 .

[74]  Jordan Grafman,et al.  Procedural learning is impaired in patients with prefrontal lesions , 1999, Neurology.

[75]  Jacob Cohen Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[76]  D. Stuss,et al.  The effects of focal anterior and posterior brain lesions on verbal fluency , 1998, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

[77]  E. Miller,et al.  Verbal fluency as a function of a measure of verbal intelligence and in relation to different types of cerebral pathology. , 1984, The British journal of clinical psychology.

[78]  Stephen W. Raudenbush,et al.  Random effects models. , 1994 .

[79]  Arthur L. Benton,et al.  Differential behavioral effects in frontal lobe disease , 1968 .

[80]  V. Kostic,et al.  Serial Position Learning Effects in Patients With Aneurysms of the Anterior Communicating Artery , 2002, Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology.

[81]  A. Sockloff,et al.  Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences: (revised edition), by Jacob Cohen. New York: Academic Press, 1977, xv + 474 pp., $24.50. , 1978 .

[82]  P. Rabbitt,et al.  Methodology of Frontal and Executive Function , 1999 .

[83]  Emmanuel Strypstein,et al.  Dual Task Performance after Severe Diffuse Traumatic Brain Injury or Vascular Prefrontal Damage , 2000, Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology.

[84]  William R. Shadish,et al.  Combining estimates of effect size. , 1994 .

[85]  Patrick Rabbitt,et al.  Do “Frontal Tests” Measure Executive Function? Issues of Assessment and Evidence from Fluency Tests , 2004 .

[86]  M Schwartz,et al.  The effects of focal and diffuse brain damage on strategy application: Evidence from focal lesions, traumatic brain injury and normal aging , 1998, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

[87]  A P Shimamura,et al.  Verbal and design fluency in patients with frontal lobe lesions , 2001, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.