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The experimenter would produce a number of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences to the child, asking them which ones are ‘okay’

e.g., ”Jessica is a girl.’ Is that sentence okay?’

       ”Jessica are a girl.’ Is that sentence okay?’

This method is a naturalistic observation as opposed to an experiment. The researcher would record and transcribe the child’s speech, focusing on a particular aspect of production. Researchers might then want to share their data or compare it to other data in order to test the generalizability of their work. This is made possible by CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System: MacWhinney and Snow 1985 and 1990) which maintains copies of various researcher’s transcriptions of child’s speech.^[1]

Elicited Production (EP)

Experimental methods can extract language production in a controlled fashion which allows the researcher to target particular aspects of linguistic knowledge.

The experimenter might provide the children with a fictional context, provoking them to give responses with an inverted question (Thorton 1996):

Experimenter: In this story, the crane is tickling one of the zebras. Ask the puppet which one.

Child: Which zebra is getting tickles by the crane?

This method, like natural speech sampling provide detailed examples of a child’s ability to create and organise language.

Another EP method focuses on the extent to which children can be ‘led’ to a particular language form. Potts et al. (1979) studied relative clauses, where the child was asked to complete the experimenter’s sentence:

Experimenter: Some children walk to school and some children ride

the bus. These children…

Child: … who ride the bus, that ride.

In EI tasks, children are required to imitate sentences which have been specifically designed to test particular principles. In EI, the analysis of children’s “errors” may reveal their linguistic understanding. Slobin and Welsh (1973) provide an example of this:

Experimenter: [Mozart [who cried]] came to my party

Child: [Mozart cried] and [he came to my [party]

This example shows that the child is maintaining the meaning whilst abandoning the form (relative clause embedding is converted to a coordinate structure) implying the difficulty children have with embedded clauses.

Experimenter: [[The blue shoes] and [blue pencils]] are here

Child: [blue pencil are here] and [a blue pencil are here]

This example shows that the child is maintaining the form whilst abandoning the meaning.

This method is useful for testing language comprehension because of its simplicity and game like nature. The children may be asked to ‘act out’ a story presented to them by using dolls. The child’s performance of such tasks provides rich information about whether they comprehend the language they are being asked to interpret.

Truth Value Judgement Task

This method might include an adult acting out a situation or providing a picture showing a particular action. The child will simply be asked to judge whether this is a possible interpretation for a particular sentence by answering either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Like the act out tasks, the Truth Value Judgement Task can test for possible limitations on interpretation, but in a more direct way. The task thus provides data which can be quickly and easily summarised.