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| quote: | Originally posted by camsr
you can see comprehension of written language when you respond to a question though. it seems to me like a verbal ink-blot test, or free association almost? if a stimulus is provided like the word 'manipulation', the response is supposed to be seen as what memories are accessed, under unique conditions? |
never say ink blot or free association again!!! those are fluffy tests clinicians use and are meant to have millions of interpretations. In fact if you take these projective tests with 20 different clinicians you will get about 20 different responses.
anyways, the way comprehension is tested is a person is given a passage of information (the topic vary as some people are good at remembering some topics as opposed to others) and they are asked to paraphrase it. or they select out of 4 options which sentence best summarizes the passage. they will vary the length of the passage, complexity of words used, number of passsages presented before recall, time before recall, they might use a distraction task inbetween reading and recall (mostly testing memory though)....
and after all that you have to judge whether they fully comprehended the passage or partially comprehended on a scale. then you average their score and that score is suppose to describe a persons comprehension.
the problems in cognitive psych are mostly philosophical and i dont really read much from cog psych people. but you run into problems when you just make up a word, make up a test to measure the word, and say the test actually measures this word. you have a general idea about what comprehension is, but creating an accepted operational definition is tough.
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