Story Recall Test

The Story Recall Test used to be known as the Auditory Comprehension Test (Green & Kramar, 1983), as described in Muriel Lezak’s textbook.

It consists of 30 short stories, which were recorded in a professional studio and which are now available in digital form. The stories can be played via computer speakers or headphones.

On the recommendation of Dr. Lezak many years ago, the test was broken down into six sets of five stories each and each set is equivalent to every other set.

It is important to use more than one or two stories to get a reliable measure of immediate or delayed story recall. Five stories was found to be the minimum needed for reliability. Those with impaired immediate story recall tend to have unusually large fluctuations from one story to another and it is easy to miss deficits in story recall if only one or two stories are used.

In a sample of 125 children with various learning disabilities, 50% were impaired in immediate story recall on the SRT. That is, they scored in the bottom 5% relative to 132 healthy non LD children.