Universal Nonsense: A linguistically fair nonword repetition task (2016)

Undergraduate: Leela Rao

Faculty Advisor: Barbara Goldman
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Nonword, or nonsense word, repeitition tasks are an estabilished way of measuring working memory (similar to short-term memory) in both children and adults. However, all current working memory tasks, including the widely used Nonword Repetition Task (NRT) and the Children's Test of Nonword Repetition (CNRep), are based on sounds and linguistic rules from the English language. Past research has shown that the wordlikeness, or how similar a nonword is to a real word in the participant's native language, has a strong impact on how well the participant does in the memory task. Thus, the current project aims to create a linguistically more equivalent nonword repetition task by employing linguistic rules and sounds from twelve languages spoken around the world. A list of 40 nonwords were created based on phonotactic rules and the most frequently occuring syllables in these twelve languages. Participants with various language backgrounds recruited through PSYC 101 classes, various cultural organizations, and language departments on campus wereadministered the new task and a backward digit span recall task created for this study to test the validity and reliability of the new tool. If the task is effective, the scores of the new task will be positively correlated with the scores from the digit span task and there will not be a significant difference of scores on the new task between speakers of various languages.