Story retelling and verbal working memory in people with aphasia

Story retelling (SR) in people with aphasia (PWA) has been investigated from multiple perspectives. McNeil et al. [1,2] found that the %IU/Min metric is more sensitive than %IU in differentiating PWA from healthy controls (HC). SR has also been investigated from a resource-allocation perspective, employing visual-manual tracking under dualtask conditions [3-5], relative to primacy/recency serial position effects [6] and shortterm memory demands [7-10] in normal aging and child language disorders. Montgomery, Polunenko, and Marinellie [9] found that resource capacity is importantly implicated in children’s ability to understand spoken narrative. Gabig [8] claimed that SR requires significant VWM demands and also relates to processing linguistic information, cognitive organization, and regulatory control. Gabig [8] speculated that difficulty in SR might be due to either primary or secondary linguistic representation deficits required for simultaneous processing and recall rather than impairment in VWM capacity per se. 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).