Chapter 13. How to design and analyze language acquisition studies (original) (raw)
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Experimental methods in studying child language acquisition
2013
This article reviews the some of the most widely used methods used for studying children's language acquisition including (1) spontaneous/naturalistic, diary, parental report data, (2) production methods (elicited production, repetition/elicited imitation, syntactic priming/weird word order), (3) comprehension methods (act-out, pointing, intermodal preferential looking, looking while listening, conditioned head turn preference procedure, functional neuroimaging) and (4) judgment methods (grammaticality/acceptability judgments, yes-no/truthvalue judgments). The review outlines the types of studies and age-groups to which each method is most suited, as well as the advantage and disadvantages of each. We conclude by summarising the particular methodological considerations that apply to each paradigm and to experimental design more generally. These include (1) choosing an age-appropriate task that makes communicative sense (2) motivating children to co-operate, (3) choosing a between-/within-subjects design, (4) the use of novel items (e.g., novel verbs), (5) fillers, (6) blocked, counterbalanced and random presentation, (7) the appropriate number of trials and participants, (8) drop-out rates (9) the importance of control conditions, (10) choosing a sensitive dependent measure (11) classification of responses, and (12) using an appropriate statistical test.
Journal of Child Language, 2003
We propose that parental reformulations of erroneous child utterances provide children with information about the locus of an error and hence the error itself. Since the meanings of the child utterance and the adult reformulation are the same although the forms are different, children infer that adults must be offering a correction. Analyses of longitudinal data from five children (three acquiring English and two acquiring French) show that (a) adults reformulate their children's erroneous utterances and do so significantly more often than they replay or repeat error-free utterances; (b) their rates of reformulation are similar across error-types (phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic); (c) they reformulate significantly more often to younger children, who make more errors, and these reformulations decrease significantly with age. Evidence that children attend to such reformulations comes from three measures: (a) their explicit repeats of such reformulations in their next turn; (b) their acknowledgements (yeah or uh-huh as a preface to their next turn, or a repeat of any new information included in the reformulation); and (c) their explicit rejections of reformulations where the adult has misunderstood them.
The study intends to give an overview of the observational and experimental methods in today's psycholinguistics, which sees language acquisition as a life-long experience from fetus to adolescent and even beyond. It also offers an informative guide to the history and evolution of empirical, applied psycholinguistic techniques, aiming to map and describe background mechanisms of language processing, perception, production, and acquisition, giving us an insight into fetal sensitivity to speech input, and to the intricacies of language processing both in the preverbal and in the verbal stages .
What can adult speech tell us about child language acquisition
This contribution explores a methodological problem in language acquisition studies. Much research in language acquisition has shown that children use statistical learning as a strategy in the acquisition of their native language (Saffran et al. 1996 and many others). Frequency of occurrence is also believed to determine the order of acquisition of phonological structures in the construction of the grammar (Boersma and Levelt 2000, Levelt et al. 2000, van de Weijer and Sloos 2013). How do we obtain the relevant frequency information for acquisition studies?
Theoretical Controversies of Child Language Acquisition-A Psycholinguistic Perspective
International Journal of Scientific Research Publication, 2018
The present paper presents a detailed account of the theories associated with child language acquisition from a psycholinguistic perspective and the issues associated with acquisition process of language in language development of child in different language context; In characterizing language, the theories of language development differ in the weight that they ascribe to various dimensions It further explore the Connectionist theories thus model language acquisition at the neuronal level: its outcomes in language; describing how particular grammatical structures such as the inflectional system may be acquired in particular. Finally it discusses and evaluates the theories and models to be taken into account in research by the researchers in child language acquisition.