Verbal fluency is a task requiring speakers to produce as many words as possible from a given category within a limited time. This task is widely used – including in research on bilingualism – to understand how lexical retrieval works (Shao et al., 2014). We investigated semantic verbal fluency performance in L2 English speakers as well as monolingual English speakers. Forty-nine participants (23 bilinguals and 26 monolinguals) completed four verbal fluency trials: tools, clothing, animals, and musical instruments. Analyses examined specific category performance, cognate use, cluster use, and maximum cluster size among the clothing, animals, and instruments categories. Correlations were derived to examine predictors of verbal fluency performance. Results indicated that cognate and cluster use do predict higher verbal fluency performance in each group, as well as larger cluster size in the clothing and musical instruments categories. These findings will assist in improving norming data for bilingual testing materials. Future research is needed to expand and generalize these results to a larger population.
