syntax elicitation task

[Lise Menn]

Thanks to all who replied to our query about 'experiments with children
using the elicited-production paradigm (common in aphasia research) where
you have paired pictures of similar events, and you say to the child
something like
"In this picture, the mother is giving the child an orange, and in THIS
picture..." (where the expected response could be 'the father is giving the
baby a rattle')?
	This task combines aspects of imitation, picture description, and
comprehension tasks.'

The following responses may be helpful to others:

>From Mavis Donahue:
	There's a task that Peter Hornby (sic) used, maybe in the early
1970s, that assessed kids' comprehension and production of syntactic
devices to signal given vs. new information.  I think it was in Child
Development.  If you can't find the reference, I used his same task and
materials in the paper below.  It's just like your example, except only one
element is changed in the second picture.

 Donahue, M.  (1984).  Learning disabled children's comprehension and
production
 of syntactic devices for marking given vs. new information.  Applied
Psycholinguistics, 5, 101-116.

>From Etti Dromi:
	In Leonard's cross linguistic studies on SLI children we utilized a
lot of tasks similar to what you describe. In the Hebrew design we even
expanded it into a narative task in which the child completes sentences
that are embedded in stories. It worked really well even with 2-3 years old.
Here are some references to our work in which you can learn more about the
procedures we used.

	Dromi, E., Leonard, L., & Shteiman, M. The grammatical morphology of
Hebrew-speaking children with specific language impairment: Some competing
hypotheses. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 36, 760-771, 1993.


	Leonard, L.B., & Dromi, E. The use of Hebrew verb morphology by
children with specific language impairment and children developing language
normally. First Language,  42, 283-305, 1994.

	Tur-Kaspa, H. & Dromi, E. Spoken and written language assessment  of
orally-trained children with hearing loss: Syntactic structures and
deviations. The Volta Review, 100(3), 186-202,1999.

	 Dromi, E., Leonard, L.B., Adam, G. & Zadoneisky-Erlich, S. Verb
agreement morphology in
Hebrew - speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of
Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 42 (6), 1414-1431, 1999.


from Shelley Velleman:
	That question type is used in clinical lang. tests, like the
Clinical Eval. of Language Fundamentals (now "R" or "II" or maybe even
"III" and also "P" = preschool).

from Ping Li:
	We described a procedure similiar to what you have in mind, but
it's a comprehension task (Experiment 1) so we didn't ask the child to
produce the whole sentence among the two alternatives. The article is:

Li, P., & Bowerman, M. (1998). The acquisition of lexical and grammatical
aspect in Chinese. First Language,18, 311-350.


>From Raymond Weitzman:
	information about an experiment in progress being done by Dave
Smith using a similar paradigm as training to see how children might learn
to use the passive voice.

>From Paula Menyuk:
	A suggestion to check out the old Fraser, Bellugi & Brown  1963
paper. Control of grammar in imitation, comprehension and production. J.
Verbal learning and Verbal Behavior 2, 121-135.

>From Camille Hanlon:
	A reminder that Jane Torrey, recently retired from Connecticut
College, used such a task in the '60's working on language development in
African-American English.

And from Ruth Berman, who is traveling, the promise of some information
when she gets home; if anyone wants me to relay what Ruth says, please
e-mail me and I'll do so.
	Again, many thanks to this wonderful e-community!!
	Best to all, Lise Menn


Beware Procrustes bearing Occam's razor.

Lise Menn's home page
http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/

"Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia"
http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf