Deterioration in the Production of Verbal and Nonverbal Material as a Function of Time is Contingent Upon the Meaningfulness of the Items

The performances of 100 university students were compared for their levels of production on fluency tests for verbal and nonverbal material that was manipulated to be meaningful or nonsense. For both the meaning conditions there was a significant deterioration in performance as a function of time, while production of the nonsense items remained constant. The results are consistent with the notion that the obligation for the items on the Verbal Fluency Test to be meaningful may require that the subject draws on the available word store, resulting in deterioration of performance as this word store is exhausted. © 1997 National Academy of Neuropsychology. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd