There is a need for some adaption to this sentence repetition item.
Venous ammonia concentration did not correlate with MMSE summary score and all items except the repetition item (r=−0.324, p<0.002, CI95%=−0.499 - -0.125).
Further analysis found that the internal consistencies of sub-domains were relatively low in naming and sentence repetition tasks (naming: Cronbach's α = 0.55; sentence repetition: Cronbach's α = 0.41), with the lowest scores on the naming item "Rhinoceros" and the repetition item "I only know that Liang Zhang is the one to help today" compared with other items in each task.
It added eight extra items to the 19 items of the MMSE (date and place of birth, counting backwards from five to one, naming a body part, an easy repetition item, animal naming, a similarities item, and a delayed recall test), as well as a much extended scoring range for the original MMSE items, increasing the total score from 30 to 100.
Language abilities were assessed with spontaneous speech (talking briefly about his/her health problems), repetition, understanding items extracted from The Mental Status Examination in Neurology [Strub and Black, 2000], writing of one sentence, item extracted from the MMSE [Folstein et al., 1983], and naming with the short version (15-items) of the Boston Naming Test [Kaplan et al., 1983].
This between-subjects design was adopted because of limited space on the examination and to avoid the unusual repetition of items in a classroom examination that would be required for a within-subject design.
The complete run included all the stimuli without repetition of items.
Feedback and comments provided by participants related to clarity of instructions, repetition of some items, irrelevancy of items, length of questions, similarity of items and sensitivity of questions such as income.
The last manipulated factor was the lag (LAG) between the first and second presentation of a repeated item, which was varied from 1 (immediate repetition) to 5 (4 items intervening between first and second presentation).
The second study was designed to compare effects of item overlap and item repetition in aphasic patients of different diagnostic types.
