Series Editor: Li Wei, Birkbeck College, University of London
The science of language encompasses a truly interdisciplinary field of research, with a wide range of focuses, approaches, and objectives. While linguistics has its own traditional approaches, a variety of other intellectual disciplines have contributed methodological perspectives that enrich the field as a whole. As a result, linguistics now draws on state-of-the-art work from such fields as psychology, computer science, biology, neuroscience and cognitive science, sociology, music, philosophy, and anthropology.
The interdisciplinary nature of the field presents both challenges and opportunities to students who must understand a variety of evolving research skills and methods. The Guides to Research Methods in Language and Linguistics address these skills in a systematic way for advanced students and beginning researchers in language science. The books in this series focus especially on the relationships between theory, methods and data – the understanding of which is fundamental to the successful completion of research projects and the advancement of knowledge.
Published
Forthcoming
The Guide to Second Language Acquisition
Edited by Susan M. Gass and Alison Mackey
The Guide to Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics
Edited by Nicole Müller and Martin J. Ball
Edited by Erika Hoff
This edition first published 2012
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Research methods in child language : a practical guide / edited by Erika Hoff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-3124-0 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4443-3125-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Children–Language. 2. Language awareness in children. 3. Language acquisition–Age
factors. 4. Language acquisition–Research–Methodology. I. Hoff, Erika, 1951–
P118.3.R47 2011
401′.93–dc22
2011009298
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444344004; Wiley Online Library 9781444344035; ePub 9781444344011; Mobi 9781444344028
| 1.1 | Average looking times to key trials in an infant habituation experiment involving a phoneme change at test (N = 16) |
| 4.1 | Neuroimaging methods in child language acquisition |
| 4.2 | N400 ERP response to best (congruous) completion and anomalous (incongruous) final words of visual sentences |
| 8.1 | Four-year-olds’ ratings for grammatical intransitive sentences and ungrammatical transitive sentences for a high frequency, a low frequency, and a novel verb (disappear/vanish/blick) |
| 12.1 | Examples of eyetracking systems |
| 12.2 | Calculating gaze proportions over time |
| 13.1 | The relation of MLU to age for Adam, Eve, and Sarah |
| 13.2 | The widening gap in the vocabulary growth of children from professional, working class, and welfare families across their first three years of life |
| 13.3 | Number of interchange types used by children at three ages |
| 14.1 | Examples of gestures produced by children in the early stages of language learning |
| 1 | Timecourse of children’s looking patterns during a shape bias task, at four different ages (Chapter 2) |
| 2 | One-year-olds’ fixation to named target pictures on hearing ordinary pronunciations of words and mispronunciations of words (Chapter 3) |
| 3 | N400m MEG response to congruous and incongruous final words in visual sentences (Chapter 4) |
| 4 | Brain activation to a rhyme task relative to rest, as measured with hemodynamic methods (Chapter 4) |
| 5 | The “smiley-face” scale used by adults and children to rate acceptability (Chapter 8) |
Leonard Abbeduto, PhD (University of Illinois–Chicago) is the Charles J. Anderson Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also Associate Director for Behavioral Sciences and Director of the University Center of Excellence in Developmental Disabilities at the University’s Waisman Center. His research is focused on behavioral development in atypical populations, with an emphasis on the language problems associated with fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, and autism. E-mail: Abbeduto@waisman.wisc.edu
Ben Ambridge, PhD (University of Manchester) is Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on children’s acquisition of syntax and morphology; in particular, on the retreat from overgeneralization error. Dr Ambridge is also a co-author of Child Language Acquisition, a recent textbook summarizing the major theoretical debates in the field. E-mail: Ben.Ambridge@Liverpool.ac.uk
Heike Behrens, PhD (University of Amsterdam) is Professor for Cognitive Linguistics and Language Acquisition at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her research focuses on morphosyntactic development in West Germanic languages (German, Dutch, English) and on input. She is also member and co-speaker of the Graduate School on Frequency Effects in Language at the University of Freiburg, Germany. E-mail: heiki.behrens@unibas.ch
Erica A. Cartmill, PhD (University of St Andrews) is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago working with Susan Goldin-Meadow on the role that gesture plays in language acquisition and in grounding speech in the physical world. She also studies gestural communication and social cognition in great apes. Her work is aimed at understanding the link between action and communication/language and the role gesture plays in that relationship on both evolutionary and ontogenetic timescales. E-mail: cartmill@uchicago.edu
Cynthia Core, PhD (University of Florida) CCC SLP is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, and a certified Speech–Language Pathologist. She studies the development of phonology and phonological memory and their relationships to language development in young monolingual and bilingual children in collaboration with Erika Hoff. She is also investigating the relationship between the development of speech production and speech perception in young children with cochlear implants with colleagues at The George Washington University and Gallaudet University. E-mail: core@gwu.edu
Roberta Corrigan, PhD (University of Denver) is a Professor of Linguistics and Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of numerous articles on language and cognitive development and recently co-edited Formulaic Language (vols 1 and 2, Benjamins, 2009, with Edith Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali, and Kathleen Wheatley). E-mail: corrigan@uwm.edu
Özlem Ece Demir, PhD (University of Chicago) is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago working with Susan Goldin-Meadow and Susan Levine. Her research focuses on the role of biological and environmental factors underlying children’s language, particularly narrative and reading development. E-mail: ece@uchicago.edu
David K. Dickinson, PhD (Harvard) is a Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School of Education. He has studied language and early literacy development among low-income populations, focusing on the role of oral language in literacy development. He also has authored numerous articles and co-authored books that include two volumes of the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, created tools for describing support for literacy and language learning in preschool classrooms, developed and studied the effectiveness of professional development efforts, and co-authored a preschool curriculum. E-mail: david.dickinson@vanderbilt.edu
Christopher T. Fennell, PhD (University of British Columbia) is an Associate Professor and Director of the Language Development Lab at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on monolingual and bilingual infants’ discrimination and use of phonemic information in early word learning. E-mail: fennell@uottawa.ca
Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD (University of Pennsylvania) is the Bearsdley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her work on gesture in both hearing and deaf children has revealed the importance of gesture in facilitating, supporting, and predicting language and cognitive development. E-mail: sgm@uchicago.edu
Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD (Cornell University) is the H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Education at the University of Delaware where she is also a member of the Departments of Psychology and Linguistics. She conducts research in language acquisition, early geometry, and playful learning. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and, with K. Hirsh-Pasek, the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society and the Distinguished Service to Psychological Science Award. She is author of 12 books and numerous journal articles, and is committed to the dissemination of developmental science. Her most recent book (with K. Hirsh-Pasek, L. Berk, and D. Singer) is A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool (Oxford). E-mail: roberta@udel.edu
Ligia Gómez, MA (Boston College) is a PhD candidate in the Applied Developmental Psychology program at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College. Her research interests include language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual speakers, with a particular focus on the crosslinguistic comparison of children’s lexical and syntactic skills. E-mail: gomezfra@bc.edu
Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Professor in the Department of Psychology at Temple University, where she serves as Director of the Infant Language Laboratory and Co-Founder of CiRCLE (The Center for Re-Imagining Children’s Learning and Education). She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and her PhD at University of Pennsylvania. Her research in the areas of early language development, literacy, and infant cognition has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and Human Development, resulting in 11 books and more than 100 publications. With her long-time collaborator Roberta Golinkoff, she is a recipient of the APA Bronfenbrenner Award for lifetime contribution to the science of developmental psychology in the service of science and society and the APA Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science. She also received Temple University’s Great Teacher Award and Paul Eberman Research Award. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, served as the Associate Editor of Child Development and treasurer of the International Association for Infant Studies. Her book, Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less (Rodale Books) won the prestigious Books for Better Life Award as the best psychology book in 2003. She is deeply invested in bridging the gap between research and practice. To that end, she was a researcher on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, co-developed the language and literacy preschool curricula for the State of California, and has consulted with toy companies and media programs like Sesame Workshop. E-mail: khirshpa@temple.edu
Erika Hoff, PhD (University of Michigan) is a Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University. She studies early monolingual and bilingual development and its relation to properties of children’s language exposure. She is the author of the textbook Language Development (Cengage Learning). She is also co-editor of the Blackwell Handbook of Language Development and of Childhood Bilingualism: Research on Infancy through School Age (Multilingual Matters). E-mail: ehoff@fau.edu
Vikram K. Jaswal, PhD (Stanford University) is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on early cognitive and language development, and recent work has addressed questions about the nature of trust in young children. E-mail: jaswal@virginia.edu
Ioulia Kovelman, PhD (Dartmouth College) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. She is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist interested in bilingual and monolingual language and literacy acquisition. E-mail: kovelman@umich.edu
Sara T. Kover, MS (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Psychology of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research interests include language development in children with fragile X syndrome and children with autism and the evaluation of methods for assessing language ability in children. E-mail: kover@wisc.edu
Aylin C. Küntay, PhD (University of California–Berkeley) teaches in the Psychology Department at Koç University, Istanbul. Her research interests are early morphosyntactic and pragmatic developments, and the interaction of the two. She has adopted the crosslinguistic approach in many of her studies. E-mail: akuntay@ku.edu.tr
Elena Lieven, PhD (University of Cambridge) is a Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Director of the Max Planck Child Study Centre at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research areas are syntactic development and crosslinguistic studies of child-directed speech. She is a member of the Chintang/Puma language documentation project and is studying language development in this Tibeto-Burman language. E-mail: lieven@eva.mpg.de
Andrea McDuffie, PhD (Vanderbilt University) CCC is an Assistant Scientist at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research is focused on the development of communication and language in children with autism or fragile X syndrome, including the role of parenting in optimizing children’s communicative development. E-mail: mcduffie@waisman.wisc.edu
Karla K. McGregor, PhD (Purdue University) CCC SLP is a Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and a member of the Delta Center at the University of Iowa. She is a past editor for language for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. E-mail: karla-mcgregor@uiowa.edu
David A. McKercher, PhD (Stanford University) is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His research interests are in first language acquisition and lexical semantics and he teaches courses on psycholinguistics, semantics, syntax, and morphology. E-mail: davemck@uvic.ca
Letitia R. Naigles, PhD (University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut. Her research investigates the processes of language acquisition in children with autism and compares language development across languages and cultures. E-mail: letitia.naigles@uconn.edu
Barbara Alexander Pan, PhD (Boston University) studied the language and literacy development of young monolingual and bilingual children for more than 20 years. Her work focused particularly on factors affecting the development of children from low-income families. She retired from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2009. Dr Pan passed away in February 2011.
Janina Piotroski, PhD (Miami University) is a cognitive psychologist with a background in learning and human factors. She has spent the last two years working with Letitia Naigles in investigating language development in children with autism and typically developing children. E-mail: janinapiotroski@att.net
Elaine Reese, PhD (Emory University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Dr Reese also serves as the Education Domain Leader of the Growing Up in New Zealand study at the School of Population Health at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses on language, literacy, and memory development, with a particular emphasis on the role of oral language in early literacy. E-mail: ereese@psy.otago.ac.nz
Meredith L. Rowe, EdD (Harvard University) is an Assistant Professor of Human Development at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on the role of parents and family factors in child language development and has been supported by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and the Institute for Educational Studies. E-mail: mrowe@umd.edu
Rosario Luz Rumiche, BS (Florida Atlantic University) is the Laboratory Manager for the Language Development Lab at Florida Atlantic University. She is a graduate student in the School of Social Work at Florida Atlantic University, and she is the mother of two bilingual children. E-mail: rrumiche@fau.edu.
Alison Sparks, PhD (Clark University) is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at Amherst College. Her research focuses on language and literacy development in culturally and linguistically diverse populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of children’s narrative productions in developing communicative competence. Dr Sparks consults with early childhood development programs on issues related to literacy learning and fair assessment of bilingual children. E-mail: asparks@amhearst.edu
Sebastian Suggate, PhD (University of Otago) at the time of writing this chapter was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Würzburg in Germany. His research focuses on the development of reading and language during childhood. E-mail: sebastian.suggate@paedagogik.uni-regensburg.de
Daniel Swingley, PhD (Stanford University) is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Infant Language Center. He studies word recognition, lexical representation, and lexical and phonological categorization in infants and young children. He is a pioneer in the use of the looking-while-listening procedure. E-mail: swingley@psych.upenn.edu
John C. Trueswell, PhD (University of Rochester) is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Trueswell’s lab focuses on understanding how children develop the ability to process language in real time and how this ability interacts with the acquisition of language. Trueswell is known for pioneering eyetracking methods designed for the study of spoken language processing in young children. In addition to his research, Trueswell is actively involved in undergraduate and graduate training in cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the co-creator of the Annual Undergraduate Workshop in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience, which he continues to direct. He is also director of the NSF-IGERT graduate program in Language and Communication Sciences. E-mail: trueswel@psych.upenn.edu
Marina Vasilyeva, PhD (University of Chicago) is an Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College. Her research interests encompass cognitive development and language acquisition in children. In the linguistic domain, she uses experimental methodology to investigate the role of environmental input in the development of syntactic skills. E-mail: vasilyev@bc.edu
Heidi Waterfall, PhD (University of Chicago) is a Postdoctoral Associate in Developmental Psychology at Cornell University. Her research investigates the role of the linguistic environment, specifically caregiver–child interaction, in child language development. E-mail: heidi.waterfall@gmail.com
This book reflects the ideas and efforts of many people. I would like to thank Li Wei, editor of this series, for inviting me to organize a volume on methods of studying child language development and for his guidance and support throughout the process. I would also like to thank Danielle Descoteaux and Julia Kirk at Wiley-Blackwell whose help was invaluable at many points along the way from the conception to the completion of this book. I owe special thanks to Krystal Lago, PhD student at Florida Atlantic University, who serenely managed the task of assembling this collection of chapters and keeping me relatively organized. I am deeply grateful to all the chapter authors who were a pleasure to work with and from whom I have learned a great deal. I note with sadness that the author of Chapter 7, Barbara Pan, passed away as this book was going to press.
The aim of researchers who study child language is to describe children’s language skills and language knowledge at different developmental points and to explain how children progress from their starting state to the achievement of adult-level skills and understandings. Language skills are hard to capture, and both the underlying knowledge and the mechanisms that enable language acquisition are hidden from view inside the mind of the child. Thus, researchers who study child language depend on an array of tools to reveal the object of our study. This book is about those tools. Its aim is to describe the techniques child language researchers use as we go about the business of studying language development.
Some of the methods reviewed in this book are very new, for example the use of functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study the activity of the brain. Others have a longer history – for example the collection, transcription, and coding of speech samples – but have been transformed in recent years by new hardware and software. Each chapter author is a researcher who uses and, in many cases, has contributed to the development of the methods described. The authors were asked to describe the research aims their methods serve, the details of the implementation of those methods, and the type of data the methods yield. Each chapter provides some discussion of the alternative methods available to researchers and their attendant advantages and disadvantages. In many cases, the chapters are part personal travelogue, describing the researcher’s journey from research aim to research method.
The book is organized into four parts. The first focuses on laboratory techniques that do not require language production from the participant. Most of these are techniques used to study language in infants. In Chapter 1, Christopher Fennell describes habituation procedures and their use in studying infants’ abilities to discriminate the smallest meaningful units of sound. In Chapter 2, Janina Piotroski and Letitia Naigles describe the preferential looking method as it is used to study early language comprehension. In Chapter 3, Daniel Swingley describes the development and use of the looking-while-listening procedure, which provides a window onto the online processing engaged in by prelinguistic infants as they listen to speech. In Chapter 4, Ioulia Kovelman reviews the brain imaging techniques that have been used to peek into the neural activity of infants and older children as they process language. In Chapter 5, the final chapter of this part, Roberta Golinkoff and Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek provide a historical overview of the development of these and other methods that have been used to study language in infants, moving from the early questions of what infants on average can do to the more recently asked question of what individual differences among infants portend for their future language development.
The second part of the book surveys methods that have been used to assess language knowledge in children who do produce speech. In Chapter 6, Cynthia Core provides a short course on phonological development and a survey of methods used to assess phonological development in young children. In Chapter 7, Barbara Pan does likewise for vocabulary development and its assessment. In Chapter 8, Ben Ambridge discusses methods of assessing children’s grammatical knowledge, focusing in particular on a new technique – the graded grammaticality judgment paradigm. In Chapter 9, Elaine Reese, Alison Sparks, and Sebastian Suggate describe the story retelling technique they have used to study children’s narratives. Chapters 10, 11, and 12 are introductions to three different techniques that have been used to ask questions about children’s underlying linguistic knowledge and online processing in both the lexical and the syntactic domains. In Chapter 10, David McKercher and Vikram Jaswal describe the use of judgment tasks. In Chapter 11, Marina Vasilyeva, Heidi Waterfall, and Ligia Gómez describe priming procedures. In Chapter 12, John Trueswell describes eye movement monitoring techniques.
The focus of the third part of the book is on the use of naturalistic methods to capture the speech children hear and the speech they spontaneously produce. In Chapter 13, Meredith Rowe describes methods that have been and are being used to record, transcribe, and code samples of caregiver–child interaction and illustrates the sort of findings such methods can yield. In Chapter 14, Erica Cartmill, Özlem Demir, and Susan Goldin-Meadow describe the methods used to study the gestures children produce and observe as they communicate and the role of gesture in language development. In Chapter 15, Elena Lieven and Heike Behrens describe the dense sampling procedure they and others have used to capture the nature of children’s language input and spontaneous speech. In Chapter 16, Letitia Naigles describes techniques that aim for even more than a dense sample – techniques to capture everything a child hears and/or says. In Chapter 17, David Dickinson describes approaches to capturing teacher–child interactions in preschool classrooms. In Chapter 18, Roberta Corrigan provides an introduction to the data archive and analysis tools that are the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES).
The organizing topic for the fourth part is the question of what we can learn and how we go about learning it when we study populations other than typically developing, monolingual children acquiring English. In Chapter 19, Aylin Küntay discusses crosslinguistic research. In Chapter 20, Rosario Rumiche and I describe the particular challenges of research with bilingually developing children and their families, and we describe the methods we have used in our research. In Chapter 21, Karla McGregor discusses methodological issues that are unique to the study of children with language impairment, and she reviews the standards of scientific quality that pertain to research that will provide an evidence base for clinical practice. In Chapter 22, Leonard Abbeduto, Sara Kover, and Andrea McDuffie describe their work studying language development in children with intellectual disabilities.
One aim of this collection is to provide the reader with more background and procedural detail about each method than can be included in a journal article. (Another is to be a bit more readable than the necessarily dense prose of an APA-style method section.) The hope is that the information presented in these chapters will be of use to advanced students beginning research in the field of child language, to established researchers embarking in new directions, and to readers of the scientific literature who would like more background on the procedures that yielded the data they are reading about.