Testing production
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Testing Production
Reading:
Lust, B., Flynn, S., and C. Foley. 1996. What children know about what they say: elicited
imitation as a research method for assessing children syntax. In D. McDaniel, C.
McKee and H. Smith Cairns (eds.) Methods for Assessing Children’s Syntax. MIT
Press, pp. 55-76.
Elicited imitation
Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy
Father: You mean, you want THE OTHER SPOON
Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please.
Father: Can you say “the other spoon”?
Child: Other … one … spoon.
Father: Say … “other”.
Child: Other.
Father: “Spoon”.
Child: Spoon.
Father: “Other … spoon.”
Child: Other … Spoon. Now give me other one spoon?
(From Pinker 1994, p. 281)
Elicited imitation as an experimental technique
Filling the gap (Slobin & Welsh 1973, from Lust et al. p. 58)
Adult: The red beads ___ and the brown beads are here
Child: Brown beads here and red beads here
Word order (Lust et al. p. 59)
Adult : When he sat down, Johnny read a book
Child : Johnny read a book when he sat down,
Passive
Adult: The boy was kissed by the girl
Child 1: The girl kissed the boy
Child 2: The boy kissed the girl
Child 3: Boy kiss girl
Relative clauses (Friedmann & Lavi, 2006)
‫ זו הילדה שסבתא נשקה‬:‫נסיין‬
Experimenter: This is the girl that grandma kissed
‫ זו הילדה שנשקה את סבתא‬:‫ילד‬
Child: This is the girl that kissed grandma
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Testing production
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Syntactic complexity
Friedmann, N., & Lavi, H. (2006). On the order of acquisition of A-movement, Wh-movement and V-C
movement. In A. Belletti, E. Bennati, C. Chesi, E. Di Domenico, & I. Ferrari (Eds.), Language acquisition
and development (pp. 211-217). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press/CSP.
Subjects: 60 Hebrew speaking children aged 2;2-3;10: 21 children aged 2;2-2;9, 19 children aged 2;10-3;2,
and 20 children aged 3;3-3;10.
Task: SR - 80 sentences (8 categories by syntactic complexity), 4 words.
Basic SV order:
A movement:
Wh movement:
V-C movement:
A-S-V unergative-PP
A-S-V transitive-O
A-S-V unaccusative-PP
Topicalization O-S-V-A
Subject relatives
Object relatives
A-V unergative-S-PP
A-V transitive-S-O
yesterday the-boy jumped in-the-garden
yesterday the-boy built tower
yesterday the-girl fell in-the-garden
ACC-the-tower the-boy built yesterday
(I)-saw ACC-the-girl that-kissed ACC-grandma
(I)-saw ACC-the-girl that-grandma kissed
yesterday jumped the-boy in-the-garden
yesterday built the-boy tower
"No correlation was found between repetition of any of the movement types and age (Rpb < 0.22 for all the
sentences with movement), and no significant difference in repetition was detected between the three age
groups: For example, a 2;3 year old girl succeeded in repeating all the V-C sentences, whereas a 3;10 boy
failed in them. Two girls aged 2;5 succeeded in repeating Wh sentences, whereas 4 children aged 3;7 failed
in them." (p. 214)
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Testing production
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
How does elicited imitation work? (Bley-Vroman and Chaudron, 1994):
 The subject hears the input, processes it, and forms a representation.
 The representation includes information at various levels.
 The representation is kept in STM
 The subject formulates (and produces) a sentence based on the representation,
comparing it to the model.
Advantages: Direct evidence for grammatical knowledge. Allows focusing selectively on
fine grammatical nuances. Can be used with young children with complex structures.
Sensitive to impairments. Quick.
Disadvantages: Could reflect rote behavior. Highly sensitive to limitations in short term
memory.
Elicited imitation as a linguistic evaluation tool
Sentence repetition task is able to discriminate between the children with SLI and their age matched peers.
Gardner,H., Froud,K., McClelland,A., van der Lely,H. K. J. (2006). The development of the Grammar
and Phonology Screening (GAPS) test to assess key markers of specific language difficulties in young
children. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 41(5), 513-540.
A significant effect of age group: F(4, 618)547.53, p,0.001
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Testing production
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Syntactic priming/modeling
Leonard, L. B., Wong, A. M. Y, Deevy, P., Stokes, S. F., and P. Fletcher .2006. The
production of passives by children with specific language impairment: Acquiring English
or Cantonese. Applied Psycholinguistics 27, 267–299
Sentence completion - morphology
Berko, J. (1958). The Child's Learning of English Morphology. Word, 14, 150 177.
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Testing production
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
‫וגם אמא ___ עם הברווז‬
‫אמיר שחק עם הברווז‬
‫וגם כל הילדים ___ עם הכלב‬
‫אחר כך אמיר שחק עם הכלב‬
Advantages: Useful for targeting specific items (lexicon, morphology), quick.
Disadvantages: Unnatural
Testing Adults
Lardiere, D. 2006. Knowledge of Derivational Morphology
in a Second Language Idiolect. Lardiere. Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches
to Second Language AcquisitionConference (GASLA 2006), ed. Mary Grantham O’Brien,
Christine Shea, and John Archibald, 72-79.
Mandarin-English
1. I tried to analysis what kind of a person M. is
2. when my father went bankruptcy
3. God try to give us his wisdom and happy
Method: A multiple choice test with 20 real words and 20 nonce-words
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Testing production
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Elicited production
Eliciting words - Coining words for new meaning
Clark, E. V. 1999. Coining new words: Old and new word forms for new meanings. In
L. Menn and N. Bernstein Ratner (eds.) Methods for Studying Language Production.
Lawrence Earlbaum Associates: London, pp. 53-68
Compounds have a contrastive function of differentiating objects within the same
category: moon flag vs. star flag
English speaking children favor noun-noun combinations (88%) over noun-verb or verbnoun combinations (12%) – most of which are ungrammatical
What could you call someone who throws buttons?
What could you call something that moves boxes?
Steps into noun-verb counpounds:
Verb+nounhead (wash-man) < verb+nounobject (break-bottle), verb-ing+nounobject (movingbox), verb-er +nounobject (puller-wagon) < nounobject+verb-er (water-drinker)
The blindfolded puppet/experimenter technique
Eliciting syntactic structure with pictures – relative clauses (from Reem Bshara’s PhD)
Which dog is happy? (With stickers: which boy did you put the sticker on?)
With toys (props) (picture from Idit Avram’s PhD)
Which boy has a yellow hat?
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Testing production
Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Protocols for subject and object extraction (Thornton 1996., examples from p. 92-93) –
Wanna contruction
Adult: I bet the rat wants someone to brush his teeth for him. Ask him who
Child: who do you want to brush your teeth?
Adult: The rat looks kind of hungry. I bet he wants to eat something. As him what.
Child: what do you wanna eat?
Advantages: Gamelike, natural. No doubt about the child knowledge.
Disadvantages: Long. Prone to more errors and less control over the target items
(compared to imitation).
Preference task (Novogrodsky & Friedmann 2006, p. 367)
Elicitation of a subject relative:
There are two children. One child gives a present, the other child receives a present.
Which child would you rather be? Start with ‘‘I would rather be . . .’’ or ‘‘The child . . .’’
Target answer: ‘‘(I would rather be) the child who receives a present.’’
Elicitation of an object relative:
There are two children. The father combs one child, the barber combs another child.
Which child would you rather be? Start with ‘‘I would rather be . . .’’ or ‘‘The child
that . . .’’
Target answer: ‘‘(I would rather be) the child who the father combs.’’
Practical questions?
How many subjects? At least 25
How many categories? 2x2
How many items? The more subjects, the fewer items. For 25 – 6 items per category, for
50 – 3 is enough, for case studies and within subject analysis at least 10.
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