Controlled Oral Word Association Test write down the words provided by the participant on a piece of paper. The whole examination usually takes 5–10 minutes. Controlled Oral Word Association Test Controlled Oral Word Association Test, abbreviated COWA or COWAT, is a verbal fluency test that measures spontaneous production of words belonging to the same category or beginning with some designated letter. The test was first called the "Verbal Associative Fluency Test", and then was changed to the "Controlled Word Association Test". The participant is usually asked to name words beginning with a letter, excluding proper nouns, for one minute and this procedure is repeated three
Letter frequency word variants when counting, such as "abstracts", "abstracted" and "abstracting" and not just the root word of "abstract". This system results in letters like "s" appearing much more frequently, such as when counting letters from lists of the most used English words on the Internet. A final variant is to count letters based on their frequency of use in actual texts, resulting in certain letter combinations like "th" becoming more common due to the frequent use of common words like "the". Absolute usage frequency measures like this are used when creating keyboard layouts or letter frequencies in old fashioned printing