summary of productivity (quite long)

[Alcock, Katie]

 I've had quite a few interesting replies on this and have been asked to
summarise them.

Firstly I should say a couple of things which I didn't say before:  I'm not
working on English, but on two languages that have previously not been
studied wrt language acquisition - Kiswahili, and Kigirama, a related
language spoken also in coastal Kenya.  Also, I am currently in coastal
Kenya with no access to a library (beyond about 3 books which I have with
me) and the postal service is very slow and unreliable.  So thanks to
everyone who suggested books and/or offered to mail me stuff... forgive me
if I appear rude!  But if anyone wants to send me stuff electronically I'm
really happy to get it.

I'm currently just collecting pilot data with a view to getting a larger
grant to fully characterise acquisition in these languages.  So I have
100-200 utterances each from about 5 children all in the 2-3 year age range.

Some people have used my indicators a) [walk + walked] and b)[walked +
kissed]  as measures of productivity.

However various people pointed out quite correctly that my indicator c)
[drives + finished] would not be a good measure, especially considering work
by Tomasello and others on frozen forms.

Various people pointed me to Roger Brown's book A First language (sadly not
in the collection I have here) and pointed out that the absence of a
contstruction in an obligatory context was a good indicator of
non-productivity.  This might be quite useful given the data I have.

Some people suggested a nonword elicitation task (wug - wugs).  Nice for the
future I think but not a first step with an undescribed language possibly -
also difficult given the characteristics of the children - none have been to
nursery school and none would be used to any kind of formal testing or
teaching situation.

A couple of people also said that the only way to be sure of productivity is
overregularisation.  Nice if you have a language with many irregularities
but I can count the irregularities in Kiswahili on the fingers of one hand
for the verbs [the present tense of the verb "to be" and the imperative of
the verb "to come"] and one for the nouns... [salt, sickness, tea].  However
one of these children overregularised "come here" so maybe he knows how to
do imperative...
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