Abstract
This volume reflects the range of expertise of current and former staff at the Cornell Language Acquisition Lab (CLAL) at Cornell University. It is a welcome addition to the short list of reference volumes on methods for assessing children’s language abilities, with a specific focus on morphology and syntax. The book expands over four sections and three appendices, which are written in the form of practical, ‘hands-on’ guides that novice researchers will find very useful when embarking on their first research project, and more seasoned researchers will acknowledge as a helpful reference tool that they can share and use when training their research students.
Part I (Chapters 1–3) outlines the fundamental principles and procedures of language acquisition research. With the inexperienced researcher in mind, it presents the two predominant investigative methods used in the field, namely experimental methods, comprising primarily language production and comprehension paradigms, and naturalistic methods involving participant observation. The first chapter introduces the reader to the eight steps involved in experimental methods, namely forming a hypothesis, developing an experimental design, building an appropriate experimental paradigm that will address the specific hypothesis and research questions, selecting a population, testing the hypothesis and finally collecting, analysing and interpreting the raw data. Chapter 2 highlights the ethical procedures that need to be followed when working with human participants and offers a range of practical tips and templates of participant, parental/guardian and school information sheets, that students conducting their first research experiment will find helpful. Chapter 3 delves more into the practicalities of conducting fieldwork and more importantly, of dealing with metadata, that is the documentation that goes with the raw data and allows for replicability of a study. Again, the step-by-step guide with clear figures and concrete examples will be invaluable to the inexperienced researcher but also to academics and researchers who engage in student research training.
Part II (Chapters 4–8) expands on the experimental and observational methods of language acquisition research mentioned in Part I, covering elicited and production tasks as well as comprehension and grammaticality judgement tasks. Chapter 4 offers a wealth of concrete information and examples on how to collect naturalistic data from children, spelling out in detail the practical aspects of this elicitation method that remain implicit until the researcher is faced with the task, such as selecting the right topic when interacting with the child, and how books or story-telling can be used in a more felicitous way to minimise repetition and the observer’s contamination of the data. The naturalistic speech method in this chapter, as well as the elicited production and comprehension methods in Chapters 6 and 7, are accompanied by a critical evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses that will assist the researcher in choosing the paradigm best placed to address their research hypothesis and questions.
Chapter 5 returns to the eight steps of experimental design briefly introduced in Chapter 1 and reviews them in detail. It begins by explaining what a good and testable research question should look like and how it links to the experimental design. Although the book does not go into much detail about the statistical methods for analysing language acquisition data, the focus on notions such as independent and dependent variables, statistical power, participant and item variability, counterbalancing and how it links to the experimental design and the statistical procedure, will be invaluable to researcher training. A commendable aspect of this chapter is that it moves beyond analysis of variance as the predominant statistical procedure in language acquisition research and explains why more robust statistical techniques such as mixed effects regression may be preferred. Chapter 6 focuses predominantly on two production techniques: elicited imitation and elicited production, with a very brief section on narrative tasks. When strict design and administration procedures are followed, elicited imitation or sentence repetition tasks are a useful tool for measuring children’s language development against a clearly prespecified target, and have been shown to successfully distinguish between typically developing children and children with language disorders in monolingual and multilingual contexts. This chapter is successful at guiding the researcher along the necessary steps that need to be taken in order to avoid mishaps during the experimental design and the data collection phases. The same structure regarding what the task is about, what kind of data are generated, how the task should be set up to felicitously elicit the desired structure, what the advantages and disadvantages are, permeates the presentation of three comprehension/judgement methods, namely, the act-out task, the truth-value judgement task and the grammaticality judgement task. These three methodological chapters are followed by concrete examples and will be most beneficial to the researcher when read in conjunction with Chapters 9 and 10 from Part III. These offer a detailed overview of the type of data (e.g. continuous, ordinal or categorical) generated by these tasks and how they should be processed before they are subjected to further descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. Chapter 11 on data interpretation offers the reader an invaluable guide on how to draw measured scientific inferences on the basis of the available results, how to evaluate their generalisability and how to compare them against their initial hypothesis and the existing literature.
Part IV (Chapters 12 and 13) of the volume concludes with two state-of-the-art topics: bilingual development (simultaneous and sequential) and infant research. Chapter 12 reviews assessment methods in multilingual language acquisition, and how performance-based (e.g. MLU or standardised tasks) and experience-based (e.g. background questionnaires on input quantity and quality) measures can inform us about bilingual language development. Chapter 13 briefly presents infant testing methods using the preferential looking paradigm, eye tracking or other sophisticated experimental techniques, such as the head-turn preference procedure or high-amplitude sucking. This chapter focuses more on the rationale and on task demands than the technicalities of the methods. Finally, Chapter 14 sets out the basic rationale and principles of the Virtual Linguistic Laboratory at the Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory and offers helpful insights into how data can be shared across laboratories and other stakeholders, such as students and educators, to promote interdisciplinarity and better research and academic practice.
The book’s strengths lie primarily in its hands-on approach and the lengths of descriptive detail that it goes into when reviewing the procedures that need to be followed prior to and during experimental or observational language acquisition research. It is a guide of ‘good research practice’ that, when used in conjunction with readings on theories of language acquisition and more specific experimental or naturalistic studies, will be an invaluable reference tool that apprentice researchers will appreciate and experienced academics can use as a template in their labs and on their research training courses.