Construct validity, external validity, and reliability for a battery of language-specific attention tasks

ABSTRACTBackground: Multiple language problems have been attributed to attentional impairments in people with aphasia. As a result, a number of investigations have examined the effectiveness of attentional treatments for improving impaired language processing. With few exceptions, all of the studies have used domain-general (nonspecific) attention training with nonlinguistic tasks as the therapeutic modality. Unfortunately, despite the well-documented associations between language and attention, these treatments have not yielded substantial improvements in language outcomes. It may be that the lack of specificity in these approaches for recruiting language-related attentional processes is a contributing factor. To address this issue, a Language-Specific Attention Treatment (L-SAT) (Peach, 2012) was proposed using language tasks that are purported to recruit attention for language processing. Further investigation into the attentional requirements of these tasks is needed.Aims: To establish the construct v...