Purpose
When someone with aphasia has difficulty saying a word, it’s not always obvious how much of that difficulty stems from a motor speech problem such as apraxia of speech and how much is due to a difficulty retrieving the sound of the word internally (the phonology). The Rhyme Judgement module helps to clarify the integrity of the user’s internal phonology, by asking them to make a judgement about the sound of the word without actually requiring them to say it. This can helpful in clarifying whether apraxia of speech is playing a part in the person’s difficulty producing spoken words.
In Rhyme Judgement, the name of the picture at the top rhymes with one of those at the bottom. In the above example, pear rhymes with chair. If the peron is able to select the one that rhymes with the top picture, it indicates that they are able to access the sound of the word internally, even if they’re unable to say it.
Note that in many cases (including the example above) it’s not possible to make the decision on the basis of similarities between written forms of the words alone. The word beer looks as similar to pear as does chair.
Configuration options
By default (format RJ1), you will hear a spoken question which provides the name of the top picture, in this case “pear rhymes with…..”. Consequently the person is required to access only one of the two words making up the rhyme pair. If you want to make the task harder you can set it to require the person to access both words.
Format RJ2 presents the question in written form only, meaning that the person can see the name of the top picture but cannot hear it.
Format RJ3 does not provide a question at all. This means the person has to generate in full the word forms of both members of the rhyme pair.
If you want to be quite sure that the person isn’t making judgements on the basis of the similarity of the written words, go into the exercises settings, select sets and tap “spelling doesn’t betray rhyme“. This will select only questions in which the spellings of the two members of the rhyme pair are too different from each other to serve as a useful basis for judging whether they rhyme.