Auditory discrimination picture task
Fifty-eight colour photographs, a coloured drawing and a coloured square were prepared to illustrate each o f the 60 core words. Each word from the
core list was paired with a matched non-word to create a ‘mispronunciation’ for each word. These non-word stimuli either i) differed by one phoneme with one distinctive feature difference, or ii) were the result o f a metathetic change (see Table 3.2). The same stress pattern was maintained for the non-words as occurred within the matched words (see Appendix 2).
For half o f the items, the picture was placed in front o f the child and he heard one presentation o f the word and one presentation o f the derived non-word. For the other half o f the pictures either the word or the non- word was presented twice. This prevented participants from assuming that only one word and one non-word would be presented for each picture, when their response to the second stimulus for each picture might be influenced by their response to the first. Responses to these extra presentations were not scored. A random order o f presentation o f stimuli was determined for each picture. Pre-recorded tapes were prepared with each stimulus spoken in the order o f presentation, with a 2 second pause between stimuli, to allow time for the child’s response.
This task was administered immediately after the naming procedure, which acted as a vocabulary check for this task. The child was introduced to a monkey soft toy and told "Monkey is going to try and say some words. Sometimes he says them right. Sometimes he says them wrong. Can you tell me if he is right or wrong". A picture was placed in front o f the child who was asked “Monkey says X, is he right?” . Corrective feedback was given for 3 practice items. The carrier phrase for the stimulus was phased out as soon as the child was responding appropriately so that only the stimulus word / non-word was being presented.
The test items were presented on the pre-recorded tapes to participants o f 5 years and over, and in a live-voice condition for participants under 5 years o f age, with the examiner’s mouth covered to prevent lip-reading. The child’s responses were noted.
Same /D ifferent Task (after Bridgeman & Snowling, 1988)
Items were selected from the stimuli presented by Bridgeman and Snowling (1988). These consisted o f pairs o f words with a segment change, e.g. ‘rate - race’, a matching pair o f words with a sequence change, e.g. ‘raced - rates’ and matching non-word pairs. The non-words were derived by changing the initial consonants o f the word pairs to a phonetically similar consonant, e.g. Ije its - je is t/, /je it - je is/. The word
pairs selected for this task were those in which the sequence changes occurred in words with morphological suffixes e.g. ‘rates - raced’, rather than those pairs which were mixed in terms o f presence and absence o f morphological suffixes. There were 2 sets o f stimuli, each containing 9 word pairs and 9 non-word pairs. Six o f each set consisted o f different word or non-word pairs, and 3 o f each set consisted o f same word or non word pairs, (see Appendix 3).
Each child was presented with the pairs o f non-words and words and required to say whether they were the same or different. The first items presented were the non-words pairs and then the word pairs. There were four practice pairs, for which corrective feed-back was given as required. The task items were presented one pair o f words at a time with equal stress and neutral intonation on each word. An item was repeated once if the child failed to respond, or requested a repetition. The child's responses were noted.
A B X Task
The word - nonword pairs used in the auditory discrimination picture task were manipulated by changing the vowels to create a non-word pair (see Table 3.2). Each vowel was replaced by one o f a similar length, i.e. short, long or diphthong. Stress patterns o f the matched words were maintained for these non-words and marked. For half the items the first non-word to be presented was repeated, and for the other h alf o f the items the second non-word to be presented was repeated (see Appendix 4). A random order was prepared for the items which were tape- recorded for presentation.
Two soft toys were placed in front o f the child and practice items presented by pointing to one toy and saying "He says /souf/" and pointing
to the second toy and saying "He says /touf/" and then asking "who said
/souf/?". The child was encouraged to point to one o f the toys. Corrective
feedback was given as required for the practice items. During the practice items the cue phrases were phased out, so that just the non-word stimuli was spoken as each toy is pointed to, and then the child was asked "Who said X", finally omitting all the cue phrases so that the X stimuli were also presented as a single non-word. The test items were presented live-voice, with examiner’s mouth covered. The children’s responses were noted.