PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

IN TESTING, TEACHING,
AND THERAPY
VISALI
PIRVITA
SHEVANY
ILAVARASI
 INTRODUCTION

Analyze the psycholinguistic processes for two very ordinary test tasks: repetition
and spelling.
aphasia testing, including some problems of “translating” tests from one
language to another.
an example of a teaching/therapy idea based on the results of an experimental
aphasia study and at the special requirements of designing a clinical training
experiment to test whether that idea would work in real clinical intervention
WHAT IS PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental aspects of language and speech. It is

primarily concerned with the ways in which language is represented and
processed in the brain.
Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental mechanisms that make it possible for
people to use language. It is a scientific discipline whose goal is a coherent
theory of the way in which language is produced and understood
 Psychometrics and Language Testing:
Two Basic Criteria for a Good Test
PSYCHOMETRICS : The field of figuring
out how to design behavioral tests  VALIDITY
 RELIABILTY  Test validity refers to the degree to which the
test actually measures what it claims to
if someone takes that test twice, they will get
measure. Test validity is also the extent to
pretty much the same score each time. Not the which inferences, conclusions, and decisions
same score, necessarily, because near the margins made on the basis of test scores are appropriate
of our abilities for language. and meaningful.

Tests are more reliable if they contain enough

examples of each language behavior so that you
can get an idea of a person’s average  One of the enduring problems of all kinds of
performance. Test design always involves a language testing is how hard it is to create
compromise between the reliability criterion and materials that are valid in the sense of
the need to make tests short enough for people predicting your real-world performance,
with language problems. because how you actually perform involves
somany of these nonlanguage abilities
(resourcefulness, patience, conscientiousness)
in addition to language skills.
Troubleshooting Someone’s
Problems on Familiar Language Tests

TASK ERROR
ANALYSI ANALYSI
S S
A process that breaks down an activity into
smaller parts.
By using task analysis in the classroom, teachers
find that goals are more easily reached and that
students are more likely to recall material at a
later date.
Sequences or steps are followed and practiced, Error Analysis (EA) is simply
making complex goals more attainable and hazy the systematic study of
directions clearer language mistakes. This
analysis is done so that the
identified errors can be
EXAMPLE : If a teacher posts rules of conduct, or systematically learned from
expectations in a given subject area, a checklist and weeded out.
can be provided to monitor behavioral and
academic progress. If rules or procedures are too EXAMPLE :
general for young children to grasp completely, Complete Plenty of Tests,
a listing of “how-to’s” can be charted for Drills and Exercises
clarity.
Psycholinguistics and Spelling
Detailed task analysis of the process of spelling a
word
Target word. That process started The sound waves from each phoneme
with hearing and attending to the usually contain information about the

SPELLING
SPELLING
As this word form was reaching its
Spelling
incoming sounds well enough so that one that will be coming next, and threshold, it also sent activation back
they could start to activate the right that your best information on a down to the phonemes that were in
English phonemes. Those sounds also speech sound may be its effects in it. This interactive activation—the
sent some activation to similar ones, the one that came after it. Lip and same kind of process that produces
and began to arouse words that jaw movements also contain that kind the word Superiority effect for
sounded similar to the target. In of information recognizing written letters.
psycholinguistics, a lemma (plural
lemmas or lemmata) is an abstract Probably you tried to hold onto the
conceptual form of a word that has sounds by saying them over and over
been mentally selected for utterance mentally and maybe moving your
in the early stages of speech tongue and lips so that you could
production.[1] A lemma represents a guess at the spelling using the
specific meaning but does not have phoneme-grapheme correspondences
any specific sounds that are attached that link sounds and letters together
to it. as well your memories of how similar-
sounding words are spelled.
PRODUCTION OF SPELLING

 The phonemes started activating their associated letters (graphemes). The

graphemes, in turn, activated your stored memory of the movement patterns
of the various forms of the letter (the “graphs”): uppercase and lowercase
print and script, plus your visual memory of what they look like. Assuming you
were taking the test in English, most of the vowel sounds and some of the
consonant sounds activated several letters and sets of letters.
if the target word was pheasant [fεznt], the graphemes F and PH both got
activation from the first phoneme /f/, and both E and the EA combination got
activation from the first vowel /ε/. The second syllable, which was just
pronounced /nt/ (unless the teacher was speaking hyperdistinctly), could be
spelled NT, ANT, INT, ENT, or UNT.
 Frequency-in-context helped: for example, INT and UNT usually spell the syllable [nt] at the
beginning of a word, not at the end, so hearing [fεznt] didn’t send much activation to them. And NT,
which spells the syllable [nt] if you write it N’T, is linked only to contraction like doesn’t. N’T
probably got some inhibition, in fact, sinceyou knew that [fεznt] wasn’t a contraction. So, the only
real competitionin how to spell the second syllable of this word was between ANT and ENT. And this
was as far as knowing grapheme-phoneme correspondences could get you with figuring out how to
spell [fεznt].If you had started with the wrong letters and they didn’t make a word you’d seen
before, what you wrote looked weird: FEZENT?? “Looking weird” means that your visual memory is
taking over, as itmust for this word at this point. If you’d seen the word pheasant often enough, you
formed some memory of what letters were in it and in ughly what order, so when the word’s lemma
reached threshold, it would have sent activation to that whole visual memory: pheasant (with some
of the details perhaps a little weak). The concept of pheasant, which would have been activated as
the teacher was saying the word,helped that lemma stay active. Because PH is not the usual way to
spell the F sound, you would have really noticed that pheasant is not spelled with an F when you
were learning the word. (Noticing unusual patterns helps to strengthen direct links between the
concept and the way the word looks.) The ENT/ANT choice gets some help in the ANT direction
because there are two common words that rhyme with pheasant and have the same spelling: peasant
and pleasant. Because they have those very similar sounds, they will have been somewhat aroused by
the sound of pheasant although they probably won’t come to your conscious awareness, as we said a
few paragraphs ago). Their spellings will give the ANT someactivation. Unfortunately, present will
give a boost to the spelling ENT inthe competition. That kind of thing happens a lot in English
 HOMONYMS

 The homonyms steak and stake have different spellings, the spellings would have set up a brain
fight. The target word was steak, and the concept of a nice juicy one is active in your mind.
Since you know that stake means a stick or the amount of money someone puts into a risky deal,
the wrong spelling STAKE, although it was activated because it also has the sound [steik], won’t
send any activation to the lemma of the target word steak. The right spelling STEAK, on the
other hand, will send activation to the already-active lemma of steak, and on to its already-
active concept, and they will send activation back to the spelling STEAK, so STEAK should win
the competition. Lemma stake keep the spelling STAKE active.
 What keeps the lemma stake and its spelling STAKE under control is the fact that you have the
concept of steak in your working memory. The concept of steak is being kept strong by the fact
that a rich set of concepts were aroused when you heard the word in the example phrase. They
will help STEAK inhibit STAKE. If your brain couldn’t hang onto the semantics of the target word
until you were done writing it, you would be helpless in fighting off the attack of its homonym.
(You’d be in exactly the same position as if the teacher had refused to give you a sentence so
that you could tell which word she had in mind.)
 Being unable to hold onto the concept for the target word may be a major source of spelling
errors in people with aphasia, attentional disorders, or traumatic brain injury—and if they have
aphasia, they probably also have trouble holding onto the word’s sound in memory, making
everything worse.
 Getting Letters in the Right Order
 As our STAKE/STEAK homonym example makes clear, the letters in the word have to come out in
the right order. If one of the letters that comes toward the end of the word—let’s say the K—
happens to beat out its competition and reach its activation threshold early on, it will have to be
held in a buffer (called the graphemic buffer) until all the letters that come before it have settled
any fights they might have had.
 The graphemic buffer is a working memory component of the spelling system that temporarily holds
the sequence of graphemes (abstract letters) during production of letter shapes for written spelling
or letter names for oral spelling
 The sound of the word helps to get and keep the letters in the graphemic buffer in the right order:
It’ll keep the S before the T, and the K after at least one of the vowel letters. For many words, the
sounds are even more reliable in getting the order right: If you can match letters with sounds, even
roughly, you’ll never write WAS for SAW, or KALE for LAKE. That people with dyslexia get letters in
the wrong order is that they don’t have good phonological activation going from the letters to the
sounds and/or from the sounds to the letters, so there’s nothing but their visual memory to help
them get and keep the letters lined up in the buffer in the right order.
 Double Letters
 If the word has double letters, for example tomorrow, typing errors like TOMMOROW or TOMOOROW (which sometimes also show

up as aphasic spelling errors) tell us one more interesting thing about how our brains handle spelling: Double letters aren’t like

other kinds of letter sequences. The “doubleness” is a property that has a kind of autonomy where your brain knows that the

word has a double letter in it separately from knowing which letter is the one that gets doubled. Under stress, “double” can get

linked to and then activated by the wrong letter while they all are hanging around in the graphemic buffer; that’s our model for

how errors like TOMMOROW occur.

 The final stages of spelling involve the letters in the graphemic buffer activating your motor memory of how to make the

uppercase or lowercase letters, and your visual memory of how they should look—or,if you were typing, your motor memory of

which fingers need to move to which keys.

 If your right hand is paralyzed, as often happens in people with nonfluent aphasia, you’ll have to write with your left hand,

which has little or no “motor memory” of writing and has to make letters by some kind of visually guided drawing (it’s your brain,

of course, not your hand, that has a “motor memory”).

 Right hand paralysis is an added burden for many people who have brain injuries that affect their language, because the part of

the brain that controls the right hand’s fine movements is very close to the areas involved in language processing and related

cognitive activity.