Title
Working memory after acquired brain injury: listening span recall.
Abstract
Twenty-three mildly impaired adults with acquired brain injury (ABI) and
eighteen carefully matched healthy controls performed three commonly used working
memory tasks (WM): the digit span, n-back task, and listening span task (Tompkins,
Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner,1994). In a preliminary study, Baumgarten (2009)
administered these to a small group of mildly impaired adults with ABI and controls and
found that participants with ABI made more errors on the listening span task, but did not
perform worse on the n-back or digit span tasks compared to controls.
The present study followed the same methods and procedures used in Baumgarten
(2009) with the addition of error analysis by type for recall errors made on the listening
span task. Recall errors were coded as either intrusions or omissions. Intrusion errors
were broken down into within-task intrusions, categorical intrusions, non-categorical
intrusions and phonemic intrusions. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used when
there were both between- and within-group comparisons, and simple group comparisons
were done in the absence of within-group variables. Adults with ABI made more total
errors and more omission errors than controls on the listening span task, however groups iii
Abstract
Twenty-three mildly impaired adults with acquired brain injury (ABI) and
eighteen carefully matched healthy controls performed three commonly used working
memory tasks (WM): the digit span, n-back task, and listening span task (Tompkins,
Bloise, Timko, & Baumgaertner,1994). In a preliminary study, Baumgarten (2009)
administered these to a small group of mildly impaired adults with ABI and controls and
found that participants with ABI made more errors on the listening span task, but did not
perform worse on the n-back or digit span tasks compared to controls.
The present study followed the same methods and procedures used in Baumgarten
(2009) with the addition of error analysis by type for recall errors made on the listening
span task. Recall errors were coded as either intrusions or omissions. Intrusion errors
were broken down into within-task intrusions, categorical intrusions, non-categorical
intrusions and phonemic intrusions. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used when
there were both between- and within-group comparisons, and simple group comparisons
were done in the absence of within-group variables. Adults with ABI made more total
errors and more omission errors than controls on the listening span task, however groups
did not differ in total intrusion errors or in specific intrusion error types. All participants
made more omission than intrusion errors on the listening span task. Performance on the
digit span task and the n-back task were similar between groups. The listening span task
appears to capture WM that has a linguistic base, including pre-injury vocabulary and
post-injury word fluency. The clinical significance of this is discussed.
Description
University of Minnesota M.A. thesis. June 2011. Major: Speech-language-hearing sciences. Advisor: Dr. Mary R. T. Kennedy. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 68 pages, appendices A-C.
Suggested Citation
Johnson, Shelley Christine.
(2011).
Working memory after acquired brain injury: listening span recall..
Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy,
https://hdl.handle.net/11299/114037.