Three-sample language elicitation battery with WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests

Design · All designs
Evidence · 3 claims (3 for) · 1 study (1 associational), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 3 claims rest on one study

Description

A measurement battery combining three language samples with cognitive tests. Samples were "an oral questionnaire eliciting information about the adults' background, education, and current health and activities; an oral statement describing the person they most admired; and a written statement recounting the most significant event in their lives," plus "the WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests." It yields length, clause-structure, and fluency measures across genres.

Design Implications

Context

Requirements

• Elicitation of comparable oral and written samples from each participant
• Administration of vocabulary and digit-span measures for correlational analyses

Constraints

Target Learners

• adults
• elderly adults

Learning Goals

• measuring syntactic complexity, fluency, and clause structure in adult language

Claims

• Better-educated adults scored higher on WAIS vocabulary, produced longer utterances, and used more right-branching clauses [+W]
• Adults with greater memory capacity, measured by WAIS Digits Backward, produced more complex utterances and used more right- and left-branching clauses [+W]
• Elderly adults show an overall decrement in the complexity of oral and written statements attributable to an age-related loss of left-branching clauses across all three language samples [+W]

Related Designs

Examples

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Key Sources

• Kemper, S., Kynette, D., Rash, S., O'Brien, K., & Sprott, R. (1989). Life-span changes to adults' language: Effects of memory and genre. Applied Psycholinguistics, 10, 49-66. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716400008419

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	design
id	three-sample-language-elicitation-battery
title	Three-sample language elicitation battery with WAIS vocabulary and digit-span tests
description	A measurement battery combining three language samples with cognitive tests.
status	review
generated	by process:settle-candidates on 2026-10-17
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	1 — kemper-1989

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