EXPERIMENTAL PARADIGMS IN
DEVELOPMENTAL
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Zsuzsanna Schnell
Ph. D. student
Institute of Psychology
University of Pécs
Language acquisition
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journey that begins in the womb and continues
throughout childhood, early adulthood and even
beyond.
past: acquisition literature situated the onset of lg at
about 12 months – when 1st recognizable words are
produced - hence focus on production
BUT new methods: LA starts with PROCESSING
paves the way, fetus eavesdropping -> prosody, intonation of
mother tongue -> segmentation of speech stream, familiarizing
with mother’s voice and mother tongue (Karmiloff-Smith –
Karmiloff 2002).
Findings of modern
psycholinguistic experiments
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what the child understands is much more indicative of
their stage in LA
they actually have a knowledge that is not displayed in
their utterances (espec. late starters age 3)
same is true for L2 learners.
bias for production: behaviorist views
1960’s Chomsky’s views revolutionarized psycholing.
research
focus shifted from production to comprehension
Typology
Distinction based on:
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1. Sample: Longitudinal vs. Cross sectional
2. Method: Observation based (diaries,
Experimental
3. Temporal aspect: Pre-natal vs. Post natal
4. Linguistic behavior: Pre-verbal vs. Verbal
questionnaires) vs.
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Research methods in the study of
language development
Diaries and parental reports:
as early as 18th century – own children, diaries.
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remain a valuable source,
!: misleading: tempted to write down unusual,
or interesting, and not the ordinary but relevant.
 new version: McArthur Communicative
Development Inventory (CDI) by Larry Fenson et al.
 checklist prepared by psycholinguists distributed to
parents
 has been validated in laboratory settings.
Advantages vs. Disadvantages
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ADVANTAGES: natural setting, family
context
fast, no funding needed
no training required
DISADVANTAGES: not suitable for older
children, whose lg use is more complex
may be misleading
ALL IN ALL: If used correctly, the homebased parental questionnaire is a reliable
indicator
Observational data
first motivation: reconcile allegations
of revolutionary nativism: UG, LAD
 first: tape recordings  transcripts.
 Roger Brown 1960-ies, Harvard:
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longitudinal study, studying the lg dev.
of Adam, Eve and Sarah.
 transcripts fostered our understading of child
grammar, acq. of basic sentence structures
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still a major research design
Advantages vs. disadvantages
ADVANTAGES: Observation allows indirect scrutiny,
metalinguistic competence is not a must.
 rich source of data.
 focus on environmental factors and on influence of
socialization (effect of parental input).
DISADVANTAGES: longitudinal studies are
- confined to a small n. of children (luckily results are
representative of all children)
!:transcripts may not include all situational factors, social and
contextual effects
- Difficulties arise from individual encoding – devising their own
system, rendering it unusable for others.
CHILDES – The Child Language
Data Exchange System
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu
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unified approach
standardization in research methods,
of recording and analyzing data on child language production.
1980’s: Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow proposed
setting up a computerised data-base that would be available
for the entire academic community.
CHILDES
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu
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the database can be accessed worldwide, to which
relevant material can be contributed in a standard
format.
today contains data from 22 lgs
on both first LA and second lg learning
from normally and from atipically developing
children
from early mother-child dialogues to lengthy
narratives, monologues
prosody, stress, pause patterns, metalinguistic
fators.
Allows initial assessment of hypotheses.
Longitudinal vs. Crosssectional studies
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Cross sectional studies: gather groups of children
to assess their abilities
compare performance of groups.
ADVANTAGES: allows to obtain a great deal of
data in a short time,
large samples yield results that can be
generalized.
Cross Sectional or Longtiud. studies can be either
Observational or Experimental.
Observational studies
The researcher tries not to interfere with the
subject’s natural use of lg.
a.) Naturalistic O.S. - focus on real-life
situations  linguistic socialization, env.
factors shaping LA
b.) Controlled O. S. – laboratory setting and
props are the same for all subjects
(puppets).
Experimental studies
Do involve interference from the part of the researcher.
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WUG test - Jean Berko Gleason ’50-ies – Elicited
Production experiment Using Nonce Words.
m.i.: when prompted by the linguistic context in
which the term appears, children will transform
these so as to obey the grammatical rules.
picture shown and is told it is called a „wug”. Then
subject is shown another „wug” and told: „So now
there are 2 of them.” And asked: „Now I have two…?”
Expected answer: „wugS”.
2. Every day I „gorp”. Just like every day, yesterday
I……….? „GORPED”.
Observational vs.
Experimental studies
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OS: we do not know for sure if plural marker „s” is
consciously put there, or blind imitation
ES: semi-controlled setting, eliciting the plural
marker  RULE application  true status of
grammatical markers
DISADVANTAGE of ES:
 Rigidly controlled settings may mean difficulties,
such demands of the experimental task may distort
validity and reliability of results.
 It is therefore important to verify that such patterns
are present in natural speech.
PREVERBAL I.
Pre-natal Studies of speech
perception
Prenatal (fetal):
from 6th month of gestation
method: microphone placed outside the womb,
measure modifications in:
a.) Cardiac acceleration/deceleration:
festus shows sensitivity to changes
in lgic stimuli (habituation)
b.) Fetal movement (kicking rate)
corresponds to changes in stimuli (US)
PREVERBAL II.
Post-Natal Studies of speech
perception
HASP: High Amplitude Sucking Paradigm
?: categorical perception of infants
capitalizes on natural sucking instinct
using sucking rate
as measure of interest
habituation / dehabituation
paradigm
If baby starts sucking vigorously  can
/continue to decline  can/’t discriminate sounds / m’s voice
…with older children
Conditioned head-turn paradigm
(Polka, Jusczyk, Rvachew 1995)
- with infants 6-18 months of age
-a stimulus sound is presented
repeatedly
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- Whenever there is a change in a stimulus, an
electric toy (to the side of the child’s line of vision. )
is lit up and activated.
Eventually the child learns to anticipate that
sound changes provoke a visual display, and
they will turn their head to look for it when
hearing a sound change.
methods for studying comprehension
…beyond speech (sound) perception
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preferential looking paradigm
(Hirsh-Pasek – Golinkoff 1996).
capitalizes on
differential looking behavior
when given a choice from 2 displays
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child grammar: passive voice
lexicon: pictures of objects, animals (nouns)
m.i.: child will look longer in the direction of the named object
if they understand the word / construction.
if neither object corresponds to the experimenter’s label, then
they will look at both stimuli for eqivalent periods of time.
the same holds if the baby does not know the word.
…in the verbal stages
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elicited response, interviews (monologue, retelling an
adventure>5 yrs).
 Off-line techniques
measure comprehension by getting children
a.) perform an action (act out)
b.) retell the event after hearing a linguistic stimulus
c.) picture pointing – subject is asked to point to the pic.
that depicts the action in the experimenter’s utterance.
The dog pushes the cow
vs.
The cow is pushed by the dog
(active vs. passive)
DISADVANTAGE:
experimenter influences answers (multiple choice)
- involves conscious decisions and reflections by the child
(performance limitations)
(metalinguistic competence.)
On-line techniques I.
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measure language processing as it occurs in real time.
e.g.: distinction between transitive vs. intransitive verbs.
I. Task: to listen for a particular word, e.g. „DOG”.
The subject is asked to push a button as soon as they hear
the target word.
a.) The boy was out on a walk and he watched a DOG passing by.
b.) The boy was out on a walk and he watched to*a DOG passing
by.
If they are sensitive to in-/transitive distinction, it will take
longer to react in the erroneous case (watched to* a DOG…)
because the processing of ungrammatical structures will take
longer if they have already acquired the correct grammatical
rule.
On-line techniques II.
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Non-invasive brain imaging studies: HD Event
Related Potential (ERP) Studies measuring electric
activity in brain areas.
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Eye-tracking experiments (head-mounted and
remote eye-tracking systems) (syntactic parsing,
topicality, idiom research looking time –
segmentation correlation).
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Reaction-time techniques: computers measure
reaction time in milliseconds. Time correlates with
parsing difficulties (gaden-path sentences).
Advantages vs. Disadvantages
of on-line methods
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ADVANTAGES:
fast, accurate,
reveals fine-grained differences in performance,
memory is not overburdened, does not require reflection,
since it is unconscious.
reveal competence off-line don’t (focus on comprehension)
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online: investigates the interaction between competence
and performance factors.
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DISADVANTAGES:
difficult to design,
fallible, detail sensitive.
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Conclusions
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Innovative Experimental techniques
counterbalance the limitations of a purely
observational research
Passive is more
Processing paves the way
Experimentally gained data needs to be
complemented by observations of natural
linguistic performance (social factors).
Thank you
for your
attention!
Literature:
Gleason, J. B. - Ratner, N. B. (1998). Psycholinguistics. Harcourt Brace
College Publishers. Orlando, FL.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. – Karmiloff, K. (2002). Pathways to Language. Harvard
University Press.
Sowden, H. (2008). Developmental Psycholinguistics. On-line methods in
children’s language processing. Language acquisition and language
disorders series. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.