German Reading Span Test

About

The Reading Span Test is a measure of verbal working memory. The dual-task design—evaluating the sensibility of a sentence and recalling either the last or the first words of several sentences–was first used by Baddeley and colleagues (1982). It has recently been receiving much attention in cognitive hearing research (e.g., Rönnberg et al., 2013; Lunner 2003).  In collaboration with Hörzentrum Oldenburg GmbH, I developed a German version of the Reading Span Test that was comparable to its corresponding English, Swedish, Danish, Dutch versions. The publication (Carroll et al. 2015) provides a detailed description of test development, scoring, and evaluation of test predictability for speech-in-noise intelligibility measures in hearing-impaired listeners. Special attention was paid to psycholinguistic aspects of sentence design.

Copyright

The German Reading Span Test (RST) was implemented on CD Rom by Hörzentrum Oldenburg GmbH. The copyright to the product on CD is with HörTech gGmbH.

How to obtain the RST

Commercial Usage

For commercial usage, including research funded by industry, the RST product MUST be used. Please contact HörTech gGmbH.

HörTech contact for the RST product on CD ROM:

Dr. Thomas Wittkop
t.wittkop@hoertech.de
+49 441 2172-202

Non-commercial usage

For non-commercial research purposes only (i.e., university), a list of sentences is available upon request.  Please note that this is only the list of sentences used in the test, not an implementation. The test will have to be implemented in a presentation software of choice.
Also available upon request by eligible researchers:
documentation sheet | instructions.

For further information and supplementary documentation, contact:
Dr. Rebecca Carroll (r.carroll@tu-braunschweig.de)

Citation

For any use of the German RST, we request citation of the publication:

Carroll, R., Meis, M., Schulte, M., Vormann, M., Kießling, J., & Meister, H. (2015). Development of a German Reading Span Test with dual task design for application in cognitive hearing research. International Journal of Audiology, 54(2), 136-141.
doi:10.3109/14992027.2014.952458.