A psycholinguistic analysis of clinical list-learning tests

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 & Balota, 2015 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.