ABSTRACT

Purpose: This study explored the relationship between story retelling and verbal working memory (VWM) in people with aphasia due to left-hemisphere damage (PWA), people without aphasia with left-hemisphere damage (LHD) and normal healthy controls (HC). Methods: Fifteen age-matched HC and fifteen of each, PWA and LHD participants were enrolled and their performances on the Story Retell Procedure (SRP) and WM tasks were compared with tests of association and tests of difference. The experimental tasks included the SRP, where each participant retold three stories, and “percent information units per minute (%IU/Min)” was calculated as an SRP-performance measure. The Alphabet span task served as a WM measure based on a principle component analysis. Results: All Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons were significant, with the PWA group producing the lowest %IU/Min, followed by the LHD group and then the HC group. The Bonferroni-corrected VWM score differences were also significant across the three groups, with the PWA group producing significantly lower %IU/Min than both other groups. The difference between the LHD and HC groups was not significant. The correlations between the %IU/Min and VWM score were all significant and ranged from 0.50 to 0.75 among the three groups. Conclusions: SRP performance yielded a continuum across the three groups, suggesting that SRP performance in PWA is consistent with a combination of both aphasia-related and brain damage-related deficits.