can bilinguals "replace" monolinguals in experimental data collection?

[Bruno Estigarribia]

Hi Susannah, nice to see you here since I can't see you at UNC anymore!

What exactly do you mean by "learn"? That is not only what your acquisition
measure is (à la Radford 1990), but also what does it mean to learn these
structures? How well do adults know them anyway? And what is it exactly that
adults know? With many of these "complex structures", it is far from clear
adults have the clear-cut knowledge syntactic theory adscribes them (the
example that comes to mind is basic binding theory, where adults who have
not been trained in linguistics accept the craziest things--Randy Hendrick
can talk to you about that). I think those are questions that sooner or
later we'll have to answer too.
Another issue is, you talk about learning "structures", but these things are
learned (in my opinion and that of several others who've already posted
here) very piecemeal, lexically-based perhaps. This is a very pressing
question when it comes to "rare" structures. How sure can we be that there
is such a thing as "raising-to-object" as a psychologically realistic
syntactic construct? (I know people on this list will be able to illuminate
that point, on both sides).
Just more things to think about for the bigger picture...
Bruno

Bruno Estigarribia

Assistant Professor of Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and
Literatures

Research Assistant Professor of Psychology, Cognitive Science Program

Investigator, Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities

Dey Hall, Room 332

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

estigarr at email.unc.edu
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 9:09 PM, Susannah Kirby <suki at ibiblio.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Thank you to everyone who responded with such interesting and helpful
> insights to my mono/bilingual question! The general consensus seems to be
> that my proposed solution is too complicated to work without significant
> background work (e.g. parental questionnaires) to assess the children's
> input/knowledge in English - and that even if it eventually did work, and I
> could do the stats correctly, I might still never get my results published.
>
> I think that ultimately I will start to incorporate bilingualism as a
> crucial part of what I look at. The problem at the moment is that I am
> already about one-third of the way through data collection to answer a
> "burning" question that has been haunting me for several years. I would hate
> to give up the data that I already have, and am hoping to (at some point)
> finally get the other monolinguals I need, to get an answer to this
> question.
>
> In case anyone is interested, the specific topic I'm examining is
> English-speaking children's acquisition of raising-to-object and object
> control structures - so somewhat complex, biclausal constructions. I am
> assuming that these structures take some time to learn, and that kids need
> to have enough experience with them, over time, in the input. I proposed
> raising the age for inclusion to allow kids who are getting less input in
> English (per day, as the day is split among languages) enough time to "catch
> up".
>
> Thanks again for all your suggestions and materials!
>
> Best,
> Susannah.
>
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