REY-AUDITORY-VERBAL-LEARNING-TEST - STRUCTURE OF A MODIFIED GERMAN VERSION

The Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) is widely used in scientific research as well as in clinical practice. But there exists little rese arch on the structure of the AVLT We investigated the structure of a G erman version of the AVLT, and VLMT, in 232 patients of a psychiatric clinic and in 872 patients of an epileptologic clinic. First we stated a theoretical LISREL model relating the observed variables of the VLM T to short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) as latent vari ables. Then we estimated the postulated LISREL model in the two sample s. The proposed model showed excellent fit in both samples. and there were no significant deviations between the estimated and the observed covariance matrices. Thus. STM and LTM suffice to explain the structur e of the VLMT, and the proposed structural equations model can be used to estimate STM and LTM capacity from VLMT data. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.