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.
The study of child language and, in particular, child syntax is a growing area of linguistic research, yet methodological issues often take a back seat to the findings and conclusions of specific studies in the field. 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 best 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 the type of data collected: production, comprehension, and judgment. 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.
Contributors
Helen Smith Cairns, Katherine Demuth, Jill de Villiers, Suzanne Flynn, Claire Foley, LouAnn Gerken, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Helen Goodluck, Peter Gordon, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Jennifer Ryan Hsu, Louis Michael Hsu, Celia Jakubowicz, Laurence B. Leonard, Barbara Lust, Dana McDaniel, Cecile McKee, Thomas Roeper, Michele E. Shady, Karin Stromswold, Rosalind Thornton
Language, Speech, and Communication series
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.
