Category, letter and emotional verbal fluency in Spanish-English bilingual individuals with and without traumatic brain injury

Twelve verbal fluency tasks (6 in English and 6 in Spanish) were administered to 21 healthy Spanish-English bilingual individuals and 4 Spanish-English bilingual individuals with a history of traumatic brain injury. The performance of healthy participants was examined to determine significant differences between type of verbal fluency (category, letter and emotional) and languages (English and Spanish). A two-way repeated measures analysis of variance revealed significant effects for task types and languages, but not the interaction of task types and languages. Performance of brain-injured participants was compared to healthy participants to examine patterns of impairment. Analysis of z-score profiles revealed decreased sensitivity of the letter fluency task to brain injury deficits and greater impairment in the pre-morbid non-dominant language. Implications of the results for clinical practice and future research are discussed.