The Illinois Test Of Psycholinguistic Aptitudes: What It Is And How It Is Used
Language, both written and oral, is essential to be able to understand and function in the social world, since it is what allows us to share our internal world and also understand what others think and believe.
Of course, presenting problems in this very human aspect is a serious matter, in which due professional intervention is required.
The Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Aptitudes It is a diagnostic test used in boys and girls to evaluate whether they have any type of problem in the multiple components that make up psycholinguistic functions, allowing the initiation of an intervention focused on alleviating any deficits that may exist.
What is the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Aptitudes?
The Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Aptitudes, whose authors are Samuel A. Kirk, James J. McCarthy and Winifred D. Kirk, is a diagnostic instrument whose main objective is detect both the strengths and the specific difficulties that boys and girls may manifest between 3 and 10 years old. Its application lasts about 60 minutes and only two notebooks with linguistic stimuli, a notebook, stopwatch and correction templates are necessary.
This test serves as a tool to evaluate language problems and, in this way, develop an educational intervention measuring the psycholinguistic functions involved in the communicative capacity of children, which can serve as indicators of a possible developmental and learning disorder.
The validity of this questionnaire, which aims to evaluate psycholinguistic processes in boys and girls in their childhood and pre-adolescence, is high, and has been carried out using the Pearson correlation test. In addition, it has high reliability.
What does it evaluate and how does it do it?
The Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Aptitudes measures, as we were already mentioning in the previous section, several of the psycholinguistic functions of boys and girls. These capabilities become very important when it comes to successfully carrying out communication, both oral and written
The questionnaire is made up of 11 subtests, which are grouped into two channels, with the first 5 subtests presented here grouped within the visuomotor channel and the next 6 being in the auditory-vocal channel.
Subtest number 12 presented here corresponds to one that has been discarded in more recent editions of the questionnaire, however it is interesting to dedicate a brief mention to it.
1. Visual comprehension
The ability of the evaluated person to obtain the meaning of the symbols that are presented visually is observed.
The child is asked that shows a certain object or person shown on a piece of paper or plate of the questionnaire.
2. Visuomotor sequential memory
Here the ability to reproduce sequences of figures without a clear meaning from memory after having been briefly presented with a sequence is assessed, testing the child’s short-term memory.
This subtest of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Aptitudes is ideal for evaluating the child’s visual-motor coordination, in addition to allowing us to observe if he or she is able to discern between the drawn figure and the background.
Knowing how to differentiate between one figure and another presented in two dimensions is essential to be able to acquire reading and writing skills satisfactorily.
3. Visual association
It allows us to see what capacity the child has to relate concepts that are presented visually. Drawings are presented that the evaluated person has to relate to another previous drawing
This subtest allows you to work on various aspects, such as motor expression, lexical comprehension, visual-motor coordination, oral expression and symbolic play.
4. Visual integration
It is observed how capable the child is of identifying animals, objects or other types of groups of known elements from a schematic or incomplete representation of these.
So it is possible to see the child’s ability to discern between figure and background which, as we were already commenting previously, is a key skill when learning to read and write.
5. Motor expression
This subtest may seem the least related to a person’s psycholinguistic abilities, but the truth is that the ability to manually gesture meanings It is perhaps the most complicated thing you can do if you are a hearing person.
It is measured by presenting drawings of everyday objects in which the child has the task of imitating how they would use them or expressing what they are in the form of gestures as unambiguously as possible.
6. Listening comprehension
The test allows you to evaluate the child’s ability to obtain the meaning of spoken language, in addition to working on their visual-motor coordination.
To measure listening comprehension, a fragment of a text, adapted to their age, is read aloud to the child. Next, she is shown some pictures with drawings that refer to what she has heard.
Starting from this, questions are asked to the child to see if he has understood what has been read to him asking them to point out which images best fit the text or the events described in it.
7. Auditory association
The child’s ability to relate concepts that are presented orally This is of great importance in spoken language, allowing you to relate what is being said with what has already been said, having a clear idea of ​​the topic being discussed.
To test this ability to handle linguistic symbols with meaning orally, a series of verbal analogies is made, with increasing difficulty.
In addition to seeing the child’s oral ability, it is also possible to see their lexical level and ability to recover the vocabulary they have acquired.
8. Auditory sequential memory
It allows you to orally evaluate the immediate memory of non-significant material. That is, it allows us to know what vocabulary recovery capacity the child has but without talking about a specific topic or related to a list of words.
The test consists of repeating a series of two to eight digits working on short-term memory and auditory perception.
9. Verbal expression
Is evaluated the verbal fluency and lexicon that the child has with respect to a semantic field concrete. This way you can see how much they know about a particular topic and whether their vocabulary needs to be worked on because it is deficient for their age.
This can be analyzed from the number of concepts that the child can describe verbally, in addition to relating them to others and using their real name instead of resorting to vague and incomplete descriptions.
This subtest allows you to evaluate the child’s syntactic and grammatical ability by presenting him with incomplete sentences that he must complete with drawings. The evaluated person must complete them so that they acquire a meaningful meaning.
Here it is possible work on many aspects related to the aspects described above such as their listening and visual comprehension, in addition to seeing their mastery of the vocabulary related to the phrase to be completed.
11. Auditory integration
Evaluate the ability to produce a word from the pronunciation of the first phonemes of it For example, you can ask the child ‘what am I talking about? Carame…’
12. Sound meeting
The ability to synthesize the sounds separated by a word is evaluated, in order to produce the complete word.
Rules for applying the test
As with other tests, it is essential to respect a series of rules so that the evaluation carried out with the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Aptitudes is as objective and reliable as possible. So that, It is necessary to take into account the following aspects during the application of this test :
How to improve a child’s psycholinguistic skills?
It is possible that after having applied the test, some deficits, both visual-motor and auditory, were found in the child. Although this may be an indicator of a language, developmental or learning disorder, making it necessary to see a professional, it may also be that it is only a minor problem. In any case, There are a series of strategies that can be applied to improve the child’s psycholinguistic abilities
One of the best things that parents can do is tell stories to their children, since this way they will be able to see first-hand what their ability to understand is, in addition to seeing what they have understood from the story that has been explained to them. This also helps to expand their vocabulary and also their ability to explain what they have understood.
Another option is to ask him to explain the world that surrounds him. You can be asked to describe what butterflies are like, what things you have seen today in class or on the street, what your classmates are like at school…
