Article published In: Words in the World
Edited by Laura Teddiman, Lori Buchanan and Hamad Al-Azary
[The Mental Lexicon 19:1] 2024
► pp. 6–24
A psycholinguistic analysis of clinical list-learning tests
Published online: 17 January 2025
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24023.lan
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24023.lan
Abstract
Neuropsychological assessments depend on language-based measures of cognitive functioning and the proper diagnosis
of certain disorders relies on patterns of impairment shown on these measures (Lezak et al., 2004). The current project was
motivated by the relative lack of literature integrating psycholinguistic experimental findings and clinical neuropsychological
research on tests of verbal memory, specifically list learning. It has been well documented that word-level characteristics impact
language processing and memory (see Yap, M. J., & Balota, D. A. (2015). Visual word
recognition. In A. Pollastek & R. Treiman (Eds.), The
Oxford Handbook of
Reading (pp. 26–43). Oxford University Press. for a review). Therefore,
it is critical that neuropsychologists begin to understand how current measures can be confounded by the underlying lexical and
semantic characteristics of the stimuli and how, if used properly, those characteristics could aid in diagnostic specificity. The
current study examined the structure of popular list learning tests and analyzed the influence of several psycholinguistic
variables on the performance of healthy undergraduate participants. Results demonstrated that (1) age of acquisition, emotional
valence, semantic neighborhood density, and imageability predicted recall accuracy of items from neuropsychological tests and (2)
only one of the ten clinical test lists examined adequately controlled for these influential variables. Thus, clinicians could be
missing clinically relevant data by ignoring psycholinguistic contributions to patient performance.
Article outline
- Method
- Stimulus development
- Procedure
- Data analysis and results
- Discussion
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