Linguistic validation of four parallel forms of a story retelling procedure

Abstract

This study reports the development and validation of four parallel forms of a story retelling procedure. The equivalency of forms was based on the performance of 15 adults with aphasia on 12 operationally defined productive language variables including measures of (a) verbal productivity, (b) information content, (c) grammatical well-formedness, (d) phoneme production, and (e) verbal disruptions. The results revealed no significant differences among the four forms of the test for any of the dependent measures, and strong, positive and significant correlations among forms for 11 of the 12 dependent measures. These results suggest that a wide variety of productive language variables can be reliably measured using parallel forms of the story-retelling procedure described herein.