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Psycholinguistics in Testing, Teaching, and Therapy: Visali Pirvita Shevany Ilavarasi
Psycholinguistics in Testing, Teaching, and Therapy: Visali Pirvita Shevany Ilavarasi
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
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 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
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
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,
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.