Linguistic validation of four parallel forms of a story retelling procedure

This study reports the development and validation of four parallel forms of a story retelling procedure. The equivalency of forms was based on the per formance of 15 adults with aphasia on 12 operationally defined productive l anguage variables including measures of (a) verbal productivity, (b) inform ation content, (c) grammatical well-formedness, (d) phoneme production, and (e) verbal disruptions. The results revealed no significant differences am ong the four forms of the test for any of the dependent measures, and stron g, positive and significant correlations among forms for 11 of the 12 depen dent measures. These results suggest that a wide variety of productive lang uage variables can be reliably measured using parallel forms of the story-r etelling procedure described herein.