PHONEMIC FLUENCY IN TYPICALLY DEVELOPING CHILDREN: THE SOCIOECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE

This study investigates phonemic fluency among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. This task serves to gauge one's lexicon comprehension and their ability to recall words from memory. Sixty Punjabi-speaking students aged 8-9, split into high (HSES) and low (LSES) socioeconomic groups, participated. Each group had 30 students who were asked to generate as many words as possible within 60 seconds for the letters /p/, /n/, and /k/. Results showed that students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds performed better, with the highest scores for the letter /k/, followed by /p/ and then /n/. No significant gender differences were found. The study concludes that these reference values can be useful for language and neuropsychological assessments of typically developing children.