Linguistic testsWorkshop 2

Types of Tasks

Naturalistic production tasks. Elicited Production Tasks Comprehension Tasks: Explicit Measures Comprehension Tasks: Implicit Measures Online Tasks

NATURALISTIC PRODUCTION TASKS

Naturalistic speech Naturalistic writing

WHAT THEY MEASURE

Production (oral or written)Performance (don’t tap into

competence very much)Primarily implicit knowledge

WHAT THEY STUDY

Lexical knowledgeInflectional morphology (use

of past tense morphology)Basic syntax (word order)In classroom research

Pros

Easy to conductClosest way to measuring

language as it is actually used.

Cons

Time-consuming (create and analyze transcripts)

No control over production for the experimenter

Low proficiency L2 learners may be reluctant to produce anything

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

ELICITED PRODUCTION TASKS

Eliciting entire speech/writing samples

Eliciting individual words/phrases

WHAT THEY MEASURE

Production (oral or written)Performance (tap into

competence)More explicit knowledge than

the naturalistic tasks

WHAT THEY STUDY

Lexical knowledge Inflectional morphology (have

to supply the right form of a verb)

Semantics of closed-class words (use of the vs. a)

In classroom research

Pros

More control over type of production than with naturalistic production

Can target specific words/phrases

Cons

Still a lot of transcribingMay be testing explicit rather

than implicit knowledge (with word/phrase elicitation)

Not appropriate for use with children or low literacy adults (most experimenter controlled type of elicitation is written)

COMPREHENSION TASKS: EXPLICIT MEASURES

Grammaticality JudgementsAcceptability JudgementsPreference JudgementsSentence Conjunction

Judgements

What they measure

ComprehensionPerformance (tapping directly

into competence)Very explicit knowledge

What they study

Complex sentence structure (that are not often used spontaneously)

Inflectional morphologySemantic appropriateness

(whether one grammatical sentence is appropriate in the context of another)

Pros

Can test just about any kind of grammatical construction.

Straightforward: testing exactly what we want to know.

Easy to analyze the data.

Cons

Tests highly explicit knowledgeL2 learners are often unsure

about their judgementsInappropriate for use with

children and low literacy adults (written format)

COMPREHENSION TASKS: IMPLICIT MEASURES

Truth-value judgement tasksPicture-matching/ picture -

selection tasks

What they measure

ComprehensionPerformance (tapping directly

into competence)Implicit knowledge

What they study

Interpretation of pronouns and reflexives

Aspectual interpretationGeneric vs. Specific

interpretation

Pros

No focus on grammar – test of implicit knowledge

Appropriate for children and low literacy adults – use of pictures na doral stories

Cons

Can only be used for linguistic knowledge at the syntax-semantics interface – constrained application

Tests are time consuming and difficult to construct

Have to control for many factors

Online Tasks

Self-pased reading / listening

What they measure

processingperformance with implications

for competenceimplicit knowledge – subject

does not know what is being tested

What they study

Whether some sentence types are more difficult to process then others (active vs. passive, subject questions vs. object questions)

How speakers process ambiguous

Pros

Test implicit knowledgeGet data about language use

in real time

Cons

More costly and time consuming than offline tasks

Highly constrained applicationThe connection from

reaction/reading times to conclusions about language relies on certain assumptions