Thornton R.
Methods for Assessing Children's Syntax
Elicited Production
This chapter introduces the methodology of elicited production. The goal of the chapter is to illustrate how
this experimental technique can be used to investigate children's grammatical knowledge. The focus will, therefore,
be on elicitation of syntactic structures
Elicited production is an experimental technique designed to reveal children's grammars by having them
produce particular sentence structures. The syntactic structures of interest are elicited in the broader context of a
game, frequently one in which the child interacts with a puppet. The game is orchestrated to incorporate situations
or contexts that are associated with a specific meaning and are designed to be uniquely felicitous for production of
the structure being investigated. The utterance that the child associates with the particular meaning is elicited
following a "lead-in" statement from the experimenter. For example, suppose that the goal of the experiment is to
elicit (truncated or full) passive sentences. To elicit a passive structure, a game is designed in which the child asks a
puppet a question about a scenario acted out with toys. Suppose there are two zebras in the workspace, one of
which is being tickled by a crane (who is using one of his own feathers). The experimenter might proceed as
follows:
(1)
Experimenter In this story, the crane is tickling one of the zebras.
Ask the puppet which one.
Child Which zebra is getting tickled by the crane?
Notice that the idea of the experimenter's lead-in is to provide the context and "ingredients" for production
of the structure without modeling it. This is an important difference between elicited production and elicited.
Properties of Elicited Production
One general advantage of production data is that they reveal the child's grammar without the need to make
inferences from "yes" and "no" responses, as is necessary in a judgment task. In general, comprehension tasks that
rely on "yes" versus "no" responses by children must take additional steps to ensure that these responses truly
reflect children's grammatical knowledge. In the sense that the grammar does not need to be inferred from "yes" or
"no" responses, elicited production data can be considered to more "directly" reflect the child's grammar. It is
highly unlikely that a child could put words together in a particular way accidentally. The consistent appearance of
a particular sentence type in a child's speech is strong evidence that the sentence is generated by the child's
grammar. This is especially true in cases where the child's utterance is not evident in the adult input. For example,
the elicitation technique has uncovered the fact that many young children produce negative questions with two
auxiliary verbs, such as "What did he didn't eat?". Since such questions do not appear in the adult grammar, it could
not be argued that children are mimicking the input or parroting fixed phrases. Rather, such productions can be
taken to expose a difference between the child's grammar and that of an adult.
A distinguishing feature of the elicited production technique is that it enables the experimenter to control
the meaning that is to be associated with the targeted utterance. The meaning is controlled by presenting a
particular scenario, acted out with toys and props, on each trial of the experiment. Such experimental control of the
context offers several obvious benefits. Most importantly, it eliminates many of the difficulties that arise in
attempting to interpret a child's intended meaning, a problem that is frequently confronted in investigations based
on transcripts of children's spontaneous production data.
Another virtue of the task is that it enables the experimenter to evoke sentences corresponding to complex
syntactic structures, ones that occur only rarely, if at all, in children's spontaneous speech (and possibly in adults'
speech as well). The context that is uniquely felicitous for certain complex sentences might be quite exotic in dayto-day conversation. Moreover, contexts encountered every day might not be uniquely felicitous for a given
construction, so that children may avoid using the construction and choose an alternative, simpler means of
expression. This may lead to serious underestimates of children's linguistic competence. By presenting situations
that are felicitous only for the construction that is targeted, the elicited production technique can help uncover the
full extent of children's grammatical knowledge.
Also useful is the fact that the elicited production technique allows a robust data sample of the targeted
structure to be gathered within a single experimental session. Sufficient data can be collected to draw solid conclusions about the child's grammar at a particular point in time. By contrast, in database searches of transcripts from
children's spontaneous speech, this is often not possible. In order to collect a sufficient data sample, researchers
frequently have to search files that cover months or years, leaving open the possibility that important grammatical
stages are obscured.
The elicited production methodology is appropriate for evaluating scientific hypotheses. In addition to
target sentences, a range of control sentences can be included in the planned battery of structures for elicitation.
The production data from children reveal what children do say, and when correct controls are included in the
experiment as well, they also reveal what children cannot say. In many cases it is possible to identify sentences that
are excluded from children's grammars by principles of Universal Grammar (UG).
The Elicited Production Task
The elicited production task has been in service in one form or another for more than 30 years. An early
and much celebrated use of the task was an experiment by Berko that investigated children's morphological knowledge (Berko 1958). The aim of Berko's study was to assess children's ability to create new linguistic forms, ones
that follow from the application of rules. To this end, Berko introduced children to novel words that they could not
possibly have heard before. Children between the ages of 4 and 7 were shown pictures of an object, such as a
cartoon bird, and were told what it was: "This is a 'wug.' "Then the children were shown a second picture with
another token of the same object, and were told, "Now there are two of them." To elicit the target responses,
children were invited to finish the experimenter's sentence: "There are two _____." From most children, this carrier
phrase elicited the correct form, "wugs," which was interpreted as evidence that children had internalized the
process (e.g., a rule) for supplying the plural ending to nouns. In any event, we see how the experimental results
could be used to argue that children's productions of real plural nouns are not the result of memorizing forms they
have heard in the input.
Another early use of the elicited production methodology was an experiment by Bellugi (1967, 1971), who
studied the syntactic development of the well-known children Adam, Eve, and Sarah (Brown 1973). The technique
was used to supplement data from spontaneous speech, in order to probe Adam's knowledge of subject-auxiliary
inversion in positive and negative questions. One experimenter played the role of an "old lady" puppet and spoke in
a high quavering voice. The game is reported as follows (Bellugi 1971):
(2)
Adult Adam, ask the Old Lady why she can't sit down.
Adam Old Lady, why you can't sit down?
Old Lady You haven't given me a chair.
Having fallen out of fashion for some years, the elicited production task has recently been resurrected to
study many other aspects of children's grammars, in the areas of both syntax and semantics. A partial list of the
grammatical properties and syntactic structures that have been studied includes structure dependence (Crain and
Nakayama 1987); the wanna contraction and that-trace paradigms, clitics in Italian, passives, subject-auxiliary
inversion, negation in English questions and in Italian questions; properties of referential versus bare wh-phrases in
questions, relative clauses in English, relative clauses in Italian, relative clauses in French and in Spanish, control
properties of infinitival sentences; negative polarity, and universal quantification.
It is important to appreciate that although the studies listed above have many features in common, there are
in fact many elicited production techniques. That is, the elicited production task can, and sometimes must, be
modified to accomplish the goals of a particular experiment. Nevertheless, many variations of the task have
incorporated the strategy of involving children in a game in which they interact with a puppet. For example, a child
might be invited to direct a puppet to do something (such as "Point to ..."), or the child might be directed to
question the puppet about scenarios acted out with toys, or even to correct a statement that the puppet makes about
the scenarios. In other variants of the task, children are involved in some activity with an experimenter, rather than
a puppet. For example, in the task used by Labelle (1990) to elicit relative clauses from French-speaking children,
child subjects were involved in a game placing stickers on pictures. The relative clauses were elicited in response to
the experimenter's question asking children where they wanted to place the sticker. Another variation, used recently
by Eisenberg and Cairns (1994), required children to complete a sentence started by the experimenter.
The technique of elicited production works well for children aged about 3 years and older. With effort, it
can be used with many children as young as 2 1/2. For children younger than this, however, it is difficult to
maintain the needed degree of experimental control to reliably evoke consistent data; some compromise between
elicited and spontaneous speech production data may be necessary for most children younger than around 2 1/2.