Phoneme Deletion

Platform: Unity · French, Italian · verified today

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Description

As part of the CRAB (Computerized Reading-related Assessment Battery), the Phoneme Deletion task assesses phonological awareness by asking participants to listen to a spoken word or pseudoword and respond aloud with the same item minus a target phoneme. Deletion trials are crossed with word/pseudoword lexicality and paired with repetition trials (say the item back unchanged) as a verbal-processing control condition. Spoken responses are recorded via microphone and scored offline through an automatic speech recognition (ASR) alignment pipeline. This task targets phonological manipulation ability, one of the most consistent predictors of reading acquisition in the developmental literature. Authored in Unity for the lab; the catalog preview is a recorded video walkthrough, and the full task is available as a downloadable Unity build.

Contact & Lab

Lab

Brain and Learning Lab

unige.ch

Principal investigator

Daphné Bavelier

University of Geneva

Task contact

Angela.Pasqualotto@unige.ch

Contributors

Angela Pasqualotto

University of Geneva

Conceptualization

Hugo Farajallah

University of Geneva

Software

Zeno Menestrina

University of Geneva

Software

Citation

No citation available — contact the task author.

Credits

Developed at the Brain and Learning Lab (University of Geneva) under Angela Pasqualotto (task conception) and Zeno Menestrina (software developer) as part of the CRAB (Computerized Reading-related Assessment Battery) project. Software updated by Hugo Farajallah and Zeno Menestrina (2025). Adapted from Unity to HTML/JS by Hugo Farajallah in 2026.

Domains

Auditory Processing

Psycholinguistics

Part of suite:

CRAB

Target Population

Age Categories

primary

Clinical Status

non-clinical

Additional Notes

Children learning to read

Languages

French

Italian

Run under

Engine

Unity

Operating system

Windows · Mac · Android

Format

Online + in-lab

Modalities

behavioral

Task Outputs

What it measures

Phonological awareness, via phoneme-deletion accuracy contrasted with a word/pseudoword repetition control condition

Output formats

audio

Per-trial spoken-response recording (uploaded for offline ASR scoring)

custom

Unity WebGL internal data collection: ASR-aligned transcription, error markup, and per-trial measures

Experimental design

Trial-based

Conditions

task

deletion

repetition

— Whether the participant deletes a phoneme from the heard item or simply repeats it back

lexicality

word

pseudoword

— Whether the heard item is a real word or a pseudoword

Key measures for analysis

Deletion accuracy (word vs. pseudoword), from ASR alignment
Repetition accuracy, as a verbal-processing control baseline

Recorded variables

Variable	Role	Type	Description	Unit
`phase`	independent	string	Crossed condition presented on the trial Values: word_deletion, word_repetition, pseudo_deletion, pseudo_repetition	-
`config_id`	metadata	string	Identifier of the stimulus configuration used for the trial	-
`config`	independent	string	The heard word or pseudoword item and target phoneme for the trial	-
`answers`	dependent	array	ASR-transcribed spoken response	-
`markup`	dependent	string	Error markup from ASR alignment against the expected response	-
`measures`	dependent	array	ASR-derived per-trial scoring measures from Needleman-Wunsch alignment	-
`relisten_time`	metadata	string	Timestamp if the participant requested to hear the item again	-
`file_url`	metadata	string	Path to the uploaded audio recording of the response	-

Provenance

Source: nccr-seed

Fetched: 2026-02-04

Last verified: 2026-07-17 — passed

Other tasks in this suite

CRAB

Barrage

Corsi Block-Tapping

Multiple Object Tracking

Rhyme Recognition

Vocabulary

Visual Orthography

Decoding

Text Reading

Quick Actions

Preview

View Source Code

Download Task

Web build

Suggest Edit

Additional Information

Created Date

2026-02-04

Last Modified

2026-07-17