Examining qualitative and quantitative features of verbal fluency tasks to investigate the mental lexicon in postpartum women: A neuropsychological approach of executive functions applied to language

During the postpartum period, women experience neurobiological and psychosocial variations that impact language functioning. Word production in verbal fluency tasks (VFTs) is a cognitive indicator of associative (semantic categorization and phonological analysis) and executive (inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility) processes. Also, a linguistic analysis allows for understanding production strategies (e.g., orthographic and use of rhymes), with multivariate statistics facilitating cluster identification of the most common words. Considering these approaches, this study aimed to optimize semantic and phonological VFT analysis for the identification of postpartum women’s mental lexicon using quantitative and qualitative scores. These outcomes were evaluated together with sociodemographic and reproductive data of 100 postpartum women (from Argentina). Mental lexicon description was statistically improved and showed that multiparous women clustered words more concisely than primiparous women, with increased correct words and better organizational strategies. In sum, female reproductive history improved VFT outcomes. The current results also show that factor analysis can optimize the neuropsychological study of language structuring.