Language Imaging Lab Aphasia Battery

(~15 minutes)

Phonological Short-Term Memory

This test assesses the capacity to retain speech sound information in a short-term memory store across a 5-second maintenance interval, using an AB delayed match-to-sample procedure with syllable trains (Pillay et al., 2017). The amount of material (number of syllables) held in memory is parametrically manipulated.

Materials:

digitally recorded natural utterances of CV syllables by a single talker
presented as syllable trains containing 1-5 syllables (24 trials per length condition)
same pairs = first train followed by a different recording of the same items
different pairs = first train followed by a train differing in a single CV syllable

Procedure (see figure):

presentation of two syllable trains separated by an inter-train interval (ITI) of 5 seconds
60 “same” trials, 60 “different” trials
same-different manual response following second train, using screen icons: √√ = same, XX = different
The 120 trials are divided into two balanced 60-trial blocks to avoid fatigue.

Schematic illustration of a phonological short-term memorytrial.

Trials per condition:

	Length
Type	1	2	3	4	5	Total
Same	12	12	12	12	12	60
Different	12	12	12	12	12	60

Data Analysis:

%correct for each train length (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 syllables); fitted logistic slope function

References

Pillay SB, Kraegel P, Book DS, & Binder JR. (2017). Lesion localization of a shared phonologic representation deficit on reading, rhyming, repetition, and short-term memory tasks. Society for the Neurobiology of Language, Baltimore, MD, USA.