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Objectives: To examine if late diagnosed adults with HFA or Asperger syndrome show impaired verbal fluency functioning compared to a matched control group of neurotypical individuals and to examine the cognitive processes underlying the verbal fluency results.
Methods: Thirty-one (31) adults with high functioning autism, thirty-one (31) adults with Asperger syndrome and thirty (30) control participants participated in the study. The groups were matched according to age, sex and verbal abilities. ADI-R was used in the diagnostic process and differentiation between HFA and Asperger was based on criteria of ICD-10 and Gillberg & Gillberg. Two semantic and two phonemic fluency tasks were used. The verbatim reports were analyzed and the relation between verbal fluency and performance on the WAIS III factor scales was also studied.
Results: The participants with HFA were significantly impaired on both semantic fluency tasks and on one phonemic fluency task. No significant differences appeared between the HFA group and the Asperger syndrome group. The Asperger group was only impaired in the semantic fluency tasks ‘professions’. The fluency deficits could not be attributed to a lack of strategy use or to difficulties in switching between strategies. Processing speed appeared to be a cognitive factor influencing verbal fluency performance.
Conclusions: Adults with HFA show impaired verbal fluency functioning, while the Asperger syndrome group may be unimpaired in their verbal fluency. Both groups show normal use of strategies and normal switching abilities compared to a neurotypical group. The relatively low processing speed in the HFA group negatively influenced their verbal fluency performance.