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Abstract

A story comprehension task wa s specifically developed for the clinical diagnosis of text comprehension deficits. Th e performance of 49 health y control participants on quali- tatively different Yes/No que stions confirmed that both salience and explicitness of information had an impact on question difficulty . An unselected group of brain damaged patients (n=96) made more errors, partic ularly on questions about implicit informa- tion. The subgroup of patients with left-h emispheric vascular aetiology (n=18) had particular difficulties with stated details, pa tients with right-hemispheric vascular aetio- logy (n=12) with implicit main ideas, and patients with traumatic brain injury (n=34) were most impaired on implicit information. Correlati ons with neurop sychological test scores also confirmed that the questions successfully t apped different subprocesses of comprehension. Perform ance on implicit main ideas was correlated with tests of exe- cutive functions, whereas the performance on the other thre e question types was corre- lated with long-term memory and verbal learning. These resu lts suggest that the story comprehension test is a useful diagnostic tool for neuropsychological assessment.