Methods for Assessing Children's Syntax: (Language, Speech, and Communication)

The study of child language and, in particular, child syntax is a growing area of linguistic research. This book is designed in part as a handbook to assist students and researchers in the choice and use of methods for investigating children's grammar. For example, a method (or combination of methods) can be chosen based on what is measured and who the target subject is. In addition to the selection of methods, there are also pointers for designing and conducting experimental studies and for evaluating research. "Methods for Assessing Children's Syntax" combines the features of approaches developed in experimental psychology and linguistics that ground the study of language within the study of human cognition. The first three parts focus on specific methods, divided according to type of data collected: production, comprehension and judgement. Chapters in the fourth part take up general methodological considerations that arise regardless of which method is used. All of the methods described can be modified to meet the requirements of a specific study.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Production data: collecting spontaneous production data, Katherine Demuth; analyzing children's spontaneous speech, Karin Stromswold; what children know about what they say - elicited imitation as a research method for assessing children's syntax, Barbara Lust et al; elicited production, Rosalind Thornton. Part 2 Comprehension data: the intermodal preferential looking paradigm - a window onto emerging language comprehension, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff; the picture selection task, LouAnn Gerken and Michele E. Shady; the act-out task, Helen Goodluck; questions after stories - on supplying context and eliminating it as a variable, Jill de Villiers and Thomas Roeper; on-line methods, Cecile McKee. Part 3 Judgement data: the truth-value judgement task, Peter Gordon; eliciting judgements of grammaticality and reference, Dana McDaniel and Helen Smith Cairns. Part 4 General issues: crosslinguistic investigation, Celia Jakubowicz; assessing morphosyntax in clinical settings, Laurence B. Leonard; issues in designing research and evaluating data pertaining to children's syntactic knowledge, Jennifer Ryan Hsu and Louis Michael Hsu.

About the Author :
Barbara C. Lust is Professor Emerita in the Department of Human Development and Cognitive Science Program at Cornell University Tom Roeper, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, has studied child language for thirty years, and is a co-author of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV), co-editor of Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, and one of the founding editors of Language Acquisition. He has worked on numerous grants from National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health in the US and other national science foundations in Canada, Europe and Asia. He has lectured all over the world on these topics. Laurence B. Leonard is Rachel E. Stark Distinguished Professor of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Purdue University.

Review :
"This book is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in thefield of first language acquisition. All major methods of investigatingchildren's linguisitc competence and performance are included, withchapters written by investigators who have pioneered and perfected thetechniques. The book will be on every researcher's shelf." Virginia Valian, Professor of Psychology, Hunter College;Ph. D. Program in Linguistics, CUNY Graduate Center