Construction of matched verbal and design continuous paired associate tests.

We developed verbal and figural continuous paired associate tests (CPAT) that are matched on internal consistency and on the distributional properties of mean item difficulty, variance, and skewness. The Verbal CPAT is composed of high frequency nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Selection of the designs was guided by literature on the effects of right-hemisphere damage on memory for designs. One hundred subjects were given 80 items from the verbal CPAT and 80 items from the designs CPAT. Twenty subjects at these five ranges of Wechsler Memory Quotient were evaluated: less than or equal to 79, 80-89, 90-99, 100-109, greater than or equal to 109. The final 40-item version of the Verbal CPAT had a mean of 26.72, a SD of 7.03, and an alpha of .859. The Designs CPAT had a mean of 26.42, a SD of 7.75, and an alpha of .886. Neither test was significantly skewed. These matched tests should be useful in making inferences about differences between verbal and figural memory that are not confounded with the problem of differential test sensitivity.