fill in the missing word

[Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

In the Thomas et al. paper, we were purposely replicating other work
to make a direct comparison. But we did use two different tasks to
compare the results.  There is also the general issue about what lack
of generalisation to nonce terms in atypical populations really means.
Annette
  At 8:46 pm +0800 12/5/01, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>Jean,
>   I agree that allowing children to fill in a word at the end of the
>sentence rather than in the middle helps a bit, but I wonder if that is
>enough by itself.
>   By using the "what are these?" and "what did he do?" format I was able to
>get Hungarian children to respond with inflected plurals and verbs for nonce
>words down the age of 1;8 (pigák as the plural of the nonce form piga),
>whereas I believe that your original study mostly showed competence in
>English speaking children at age 4 and perhaps a few just before age 4.  Of
>course, comparing Hungarian with all its morphology to isolating English is
>not quite fair, and I did notice that German children took a few more months
>to tune into this, so that I first saw plural productivity about 2;3.  But
>my point is that, by using the more direct question-answering format, you
>can tap into knowledge perhaps earlier and perhaps more directly.  If we are
>talking about children with SLI or WS, this is important, since we want to
>be sure that we are not just giving them a task which allows them to "get
>away with zero-marking."  (see Leonard and others on the issue of
>optionality and omissibility)
>   Another important difference to note is that I used toys to display the
>action right in front of the child.  You may be right that the child could
>still say "miff" as a past in my task, but somehow the immediacy of the
>action makes this a bit less likely.
>   If we compare the answers on the plural test to the answers on the past, I
>think I see your point.  For the plural, if I say "What are these?" it is
>fairly difficult for the child to just say "wug" as if two objects were one.
>However, for the verb, if I say "what did he do?" the answer "miff" instead
>of "miffed" seems a bit more acceptable.  I agree that, by age 4 children
>begin to understand that they have to adapt their verb to the "Yesterday he
>...? frame, but again that is age 4, not age 2.
>   I guess what we need here is a study that actually runs the two methods in
>a head on comparison.  Of course each method has a combination of
>potentially important features.  In particular, the question-answering
>method makes use of toys that the child can hold, whereas the fill in the
>missing word method seems to rely on totally verbal presentation, without
>even pictures as a support.
>   What surprises me is that this crucial methodological issue has never been
>discussed in the literature.  Or have I missed something?
>
>--Brian MacWhinney

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________________________________________________________________
Professor A.Karmiloff-Smith,
Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit,
Institute of Child Health,
30 Guilford Street,
London WC1N 1EH, U.K.
tel: 0207 905 2754
fax: 0207 242 7717
http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/units/ncdu/NDU_homepage.htm
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