Question:
I was wondering if there are any researches/studies on
psychometrics of the phonemes perception and generation in learners of second languages L2
(which of course would depend upon their L1s)
I know of the extensive research on psycho-physiological
aspects of basic human perception (I once read the chore
and now I am thoroughly rereading Nunnally’s Psychometric
Theory), but I don’t know of anything involving a (re)learned
code such as language
Answer:
I have never done any work in this area although I had started some
work in the more simple area of predicting second language verbal
learning (so long ago I forget exactly what I was doing) just before
the gov't closed the institute. I found that there was surprisingly
little interaction between the psycho-physiological aspects of language
learning and second language learning. And IIRC very little interest
at all in psychometrics. And of course the psychometricians and SL
people are often not interested in the psycho-physiological aspects.
I imagine that you have already tried but it may be time to start
calling around the old boy/girl network.
This may be totally redundant and if so excuse me, but I used to work
for a gov't dept where I'd get all kinds of weird requests.
Adapting this to your problem I'd say: Just walk around the psych dept
and the cognitive sc. dept & ??? depts and ask the first academic type
who does psychometrics, second language learning, psycho-physiological
aspects of language learning about your problem and see who they know.
Try and get a couple of names of even vaguely useful contacts (plus
phone #, e-mail) from each and go to the next contacts. Terribly time
consuming sometimes but the human brain is still the best data base for
this type of thing. If the reseacher/research exists you probably
should either get a hit or definate confirmation that it does not in
about 4-6 contacts through one set of researchers or the other.
BTW, Nunnelly is excellent but getting a bit out of date in some ways.
You might want to look at something a bit newer as well. The only
thing that immediately comes to mind is Crocker, L. & Algina, J.
(1986). Introduction to Classical and Modern Test Theory. New York:
Holt Reinhard and Winston.
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