The role of education levels and gender on reading and phonemic (initial letter) fluency in healthy adults

Abstract

Present study is designed to investigate the effects of gender and education level on both reading and phonemic (initial letter) fluency. A total of 150 healthy adults aged between 20-35 years, and grouped in three levels of education (primary school, high school and university graduates) were served as participants. For reading fluency 150 words passage was used. For phonemic fluency, first the most frequently used letters in Turkish were screened from the dictionary. They were letters K and S. Then participants were asked to say as many words as possible in one minute starting with each letter. One-way ANOVA and independent samples-t tests were used for statistical analysis. Significant effects were found for gender and education level in reading fluency task. For phonemic fluency task significant effects were found for education level but no gender effect was found. The level of education was negatively correlated with the reading fluency suggesting that as the year of education increases, the duration for reading 150 words passage decreases. The level of education, on the other hand, was positively correlated with the total number of words produced implying that as the year of education increases, the number of words said in one minute increases as well. The correlation between reading and initial letter fluency was also studied and a significant negative correlation was found for both males and females. As the reading time of 150 words decreases, the number of total words said in one minute increases, suggesting that good readers may also be good word retrievers.