Research Methods in Language Acquisition: Principles, Procedures, and Practices(Language and the Human Lifespan Series)

About the Book

Synthesizing decades of collective experience into a set of practical guidelines for students and budding researchers, the authors of this book introduce a systematic approach to generating, processing, and interpreting reliable and valid speech data. They review a variety of observational and experimental tasks that allow researchers to collect natural speech, elicit specific types of speech, and assess language comprehension.

Guidelines for generating data sets by transcribing and coding raw speech data are also reviewed, as are special considerations for working with infants and multilingual children.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Fundamentals of Language Acquisition Research

1. The Challenge of Studying Language
2. Preparing to Work With Children, Schools, and Families
3. Creating the Data I: Working in Teams, Basic Data Collection, Data Sharing, and Data Management

II. Experimental and Observational Methods in Language Acquisition Research

1. Studying Language Acquisition Through Collecting Speech
2. Introduction to Experimental Methods: Design and Analysis
3. Experimental Tasks for Generating Language Production Data
4. Experimental Tasks for Generating Language Comprehension Data
5. The Grammaticality Judgment Task

III. Managing and Interpreting Speech Data

1. Creating the Data II: Begin Data Processing
2. Creating the Data III: Preparing for Data Analysis
3. Interpreting the Data: Scientific Inference

IV. Special Considerations in Language Acquisition Research

1. Assessing Multilingual Acquisition
2. Introduction to Infant Testing Methods in Language Acquisition Research
3. Conclusions and Proceeding to the Future

Appendix A. Transcription Symbols

Appendix B. The International Phonetic Alphabet

Appendix C. Outline for Preparation of Schematic Research Proposal

Suggested Readings

References

Index

About the Authors

About the Author :
Mar amp iacute a Blume, PhD, is an associate professor in linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Cat amp oacute lica del Per amp uacute . She received her PhD in linguistics at Cornell University.
 
Her research interests include first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, cognition, and the acquisition of morphology and syntax and their interaction with pragmatics.
 
She was a member of the Cornell Language Acquisition Lab and founded and directed the University of Texas at El Paso Language Acquisition and Linguistics Research Lab. She is a founding member of the Virtual Center for the Study of Language Acquisition (VCLA) and through support of the National Science Foundation has collaborated with members of the VCLA in creating a series of materials related to research in language acquisition: the Virtual Linguistics Lab and the Data Transcription and Analysis Tool.
 
She recently coauthored a book published by Cambridge University Press: Bilingualism in the Spanish-Speaking World: Linguistic and Cognitive Perspectives (Austin, Blume, amp amp S amp aacute nchez, 2 5).
 
Barbara C. Lust, PhD, is a professor of developmental psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science at Cornell University, where she has taught for more than 3 years.
 
There, she and her students and collaborators have built the Cornell University Language Acquisition Lab, which houses and supports ongoing research on language acquisition involving more than 2 languages. Together they have constructed a range of materials for the crosslinguistic interdisciplinary study of language acquisition.
 
Her research interests focus on crosslinguistic analyses of language acquisition with a view to factoring out universal from language-specific factors in a comprehensive theory.
 
In addition to numerous journal and book articles, she has authored Child Language: Acquisition and Growth (2 new edition in preparation). With Claire Foley, she coedited Language Acquisition: The Essential Readings (2 4). With Mar amp iacute a Blume, she codirected the development of an international cyberinfrastructure-based project to support research and teaching in an interdisciplinary framework, amp quot Transforming the Primary Research Process Through Cybertool Dissemination: An Implementation of a Virtual Center for the Study of Language Acquisition amp quot (NSF CI- 7534 5).