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ED 015 434 24 AL 999 691
A FIELD MANUAL FOR CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF THE ACQUISITION OF
COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE. SECOND ORAFT--JULY 1967.
BY- SLOBIN, CAN I. AND OTHERS
CALIFORNIA UNIV., BERKELEY
REPORT NUMBER BR-6-8757 FUB CATE JUL 67
CONTRACT OEC-4-7-998757-2015
ECRS FRICE MF-$1.99 HC-$15.28 255F.
CESCRIFTORS- PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, *CHILO CEVELOFMENT,
SOCIOLINGUISTICS, *LANGUAGE CEVELOPMENT, LANGUAGE ABILITY,
APPLIED LINGUISTICS, STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS, *LANGUAGE RESEARCH,
*FIELO STUDIES, FIELO INTERVIEWS, *RESEARCH METHODOLOGY,
GUIDES, MANUALS, RESEARCH CRITERIA, TAPE RECORDINGS, SOCIAL
CHARACTERISTICS, RESEARCHERS. CULTURAL FACTORS,
BIBLIOGRAFHIES. VERBAL COMMUNICATION, RESEARCH SKILLS,
RESEARCH DESIGN, FSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES, CHILD LANGUAGE, CROSS
CULTURAL RESEARCH,
THIS FIELD MANUAL WAS CEVELOFED AS FART OF A FROGRAM TO
TRAIN INVESTIGATORS IN THE COLLECTION OF COMPARABLE
CROSS-LINGUISTIC ANG CROSS-CULTURAL CATA ON CHILDREN'S
ACQUISITION OF LINGUISTIC CODES AND SOCIAL RULES FOR THE USE
OF SUCH CODES. ALTHOUGH COMFARATIVE RESEARCH REQUIRES
FROCEDURAL STANDARDIZATION, THE FHYSICAL AND SOCIAL
CONDITIONS IN THE VARIOUS FIELD SETTINGS INTERFERE WITH
STANDARDS SET FRIOR TO ARRIVAL IN THE FIELD. THIS MANUAL
CONSTITUTES A COMMON FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR INVESTIGATORS
COLLECTING CATA THAT IS TO BE USED IN COMPARATIVE REFORTS.
FART I OF THIS MANUAL CEFINES THE MAJOR TOFICS TO BE
INVESTIGATED AND SETS UF A RESEARCH SCHEDULE. FART II
CISCUSSES SUCH METHODOLOGICAL FACTORS AS CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
OF LANGUAGES AND CULTURES. RECORDING AFFARATUS AND
TECHNIQUES. AND NATIVE INFORMANTS, ASSISTANTS AND
INTERPRETERS. THE THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS INCLUDED IN FART
ITI ARE FHONOLOGY, GRAMMAR, SEMANTICS, THE SOCIAL SETTING OF
LINGUISTIC BEHAVIOR, AND LANGUAGE USAGES AND STYLES. AFFENDECD
ARE EXTENSIVE REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL SUGGESTED FIELD
TECHNIQUES. THE REACER OF THE MANUAL SHOULD HAVE SOME
KNOWLECGE OF LINGUISTICS BUT NEED NOT HAVE CONDUCTED FREVIOUS
FIELD WORK. REQUESTS FOR COFIES OF THE MANUAL AND FOR TAFES
TO BE USEC IN FHONOLOGICAL IMITATION FROCECDURES, AND
INFORMATION ABOUT RELEATED STUDIES SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO OR.
CAN I. SLOBIN, CEFARTMENT OF FSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 94720. (JD)
aq
ED015434
AL 000 601
A FIELD MANUAL
for cross-cultural Study of the
acquisition of communicative competence -
(Second draft -- July 1967)
Edited by
Dan |. Slobin
And written by
Susan M. Ervin-Tripp
John J. Gumperz
Dan |. Slobin
Jan Brukman
Keith Kernan
Claudia Mitchell
Brian Stross
University of California
Berkeley
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE
OFFICE OF EDUCATION
THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE
PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT. POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS
STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION
POSITION OR POLICY.
A FIELD MANUAL
for cross-cultural study of the
acquisition of communicative competence
(Second Draft -- July 1967)
Edited by
Dan |. Slobin
And written by
“DERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS
waren Ms = ang Susan M. Ervin-Tripp
BY Deters John J. Gumperz
Oa ee MK TE US. OFFICE OF Dan |. Slobin
FURTHER REPRODUCTION OUTSIDE
age REQUIRES PERMISSION OF Jan Brukman
CORRE OWNER.” Keith Kernan
THE
Claudia Mitchell
Brian Stross
University of California
Berkeley
With support from
Institute of Human Learning
University of California, Berkeley
National Science Foundation
Project Literacy
Social Science Research Council
United States Office of Education
(Contract 4-7-008757-2015)
;
Lj
Contents
INTRODUCTION e 7 * e e * ° o * . * . . * ”
PART ONE:
1.0.
1.1.
1.2.
1.3.6
La
1.5.
1.6.
1.7.
PART TWO:
2el.
2.2.
2.3.
MAJOR TOPICS OF INVESTIGATION
Research Schedule . . .« « « « « «
Motor Development ....+-«-e««-.
Linguistic Development: Phonology
1.2.1. Definitions ......
alt oo Imitation * e e cd * o 2
hedede Babbling oeeoeeee#e @
1.2.4. Speech Samples .....
Linguistic Development: Vocabulary
1.3.1. Initial Vocabulary ...
1.3.2. Vocabulary Related to Grammatical Categorie
Linguistic Development: Grammar... . -«
1.4.1. Collection of Basic Corpora
1.4.2. Elicited Sentence Imitation
1.4.3. Speech Comprehension. .
1.4.4. Elicitation of Speech .
Communicative Development. . . « «
1.5.1. The Child's Lifespace .
1.5.2. Dialog between Children
1.5.3. Parental Baby Talk...
1.5.4. Communicative Routines .
Linguistic Belief Systems. ....
Notes and Queries for Observation.
METHODOLOGICAL FACTORS
Contrastive Analysis . . « « « «
21.1. Methods . .« « e e e
2.1.2. Style vs. Speaker ..
2.1.3. Functional Realization
2.1.4. Linguistic Contrasts .
2.1.5. Vocal Signals ....
2.1.6
2ek07
Cc
- intelligibility ...
- Evaluation . . . «se.
rding Apparatus and Techniques
2.2 ode Apparatus * * * * a * *
2.2.2. Recording Techniques . .
2.2.3. Care and Servicing...
EE EE eee
Native Informants, Assistants, and Interpreters
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2.3.1. Factors of Social Organization...
223-2. Problems of Social Change. ....« -«
2.3-3- Social Criteria in the Selection of
Informants and Assistants
iii
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Page
PART THREE: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND POSSIBLE ‘y
SUBSIDIARY STUDIES t
3.1. Phonology ...«-e«eseseever ete ee eee ee @ 93
3.1.1. Pre-Linguistic Studies eeeeeee# @ 93
3.3.8. Reirearns CYAOPR + ee re ee eo es 95 p
3.2. Grammar ...-c«4-c-eeee ee 2 2 2 © © e 8° e860. 105
3.2.1. Aspects of the Acquisition of English
Grammar . e e es e * a td oe eo a o a e e & © 106
3.2.2. Implications and Suggestions for Cross-~
Linguistic Research ...-+.++e-+ee- 116 N
3 3 ° Semantics e e e * e e o i * * e . * e * © . e a e 121 ty
3.3.1. Languege and Cognitive Development ... 121
3.3.2. Componential Analysis .......-+.e. 12h
3.4. The Social Setting of Linguistic Behavior ...+-+-+ 4129
3.4.1. The Relation of Linguistic to Social “
Categories a e a td e se & a - eo + a e o * 129
3.4.2. Relation of Language Development to
Other Areas of Socialization. ....e.e- 135 :
3.4.3. Informal Education ....-2-eceeee 137
3.4.4. Formal Education ....-+eeeeee LY
3.5. Usage and Styles . 2. + «e+ ee ee ee © © © © © @ 155
3.5.0. Introduction .....2e2eercececeee 155
3.5.1. The Acquisition of Usage Pattermns .... 157
3.5.2. Special Languages, Verbal Art, Speech i
Playe «© «eee ee eevee ee ee eo @ @ 166 : Nis
3.5.3. Natural Conversation .....2e-e-ee- fe
3.5.4. Multilingualism and Multidialectism... 176
3.5.5. Linguistic Taboos ....+-++eee-ee- 180
3.5.6. Speech Acts: Notes for Designing a Cross-
Cultural Study of the Speech Act of |
Promising e e * * . = e e e e e e e e e e 186
APPENDICES -
1. Techniques for Studying Grammatical Development... 193 sis
1.1. Model Sentences for Elicited Imitation .. 193
1.2. Comprehension Tests... 2. 2eeeeeeee 198 )
1.3. Elicitation Techniques .....2+e+-+e-e+ 201 Uy
2. Transcription of Tapes .. + s«+«-eeeee ee ee 2 212
2.1. Nature of Transcription . ...+«+e«e«e«¢ee 212
2.2. Suggested Transcription Format for Dialog . 214
2.3. Suggested Transcription Format for ea
MOM cp cece eee eee eee oe) «6
3. Techniques for Studying Multilingualism. ...... 218 |
3.1. Picture Vocabulary Test .....-2eee+ee 218 .
3.2. Word Association Test .. «2 e«-2eeee- 220
3.3. Following Directions. .....+s-seeee- 220 |
3.4. Self-Ratings. oeeee ee © © @ © © &© & @ 221 .
iv
eo
a ¢
me ee et ee
h, Useful Tables .. 2+ ees eeee eee e eee ee 2% 222
oe Age. Calculation Chart «2«ee+e-eee2822% 2% © 222
4.2. International Phonetic Alphabet eececeeeeees., 223
5. Selected List of References on the Acquisition of 21
Different Native Languages ..-+«e«eeeeee ee © © 22%
REFERENCES
eeeeeee#e
eeeeeee#e# eee ¢ #® # #@# eeeee®*® 227
Tables
1. Major Research Tasks . 2.22 eee eee eee eee eevee
2. Distribution of Children by Age, Sex, and Task .... « «
36 12-Month Time Schedule eeeeeeegeeeeeeseeee#e# # # #® @
4. Developmental Milestones in Motor and Language Development
(from Lenneberg 3 1967) e e & a @ 6 e ® e a % e ® . @ 2 oe eo 7
5. General Scheme of Phonemic Development in Russian Children |
(after Shvachkin, 1948) . 2.2.2 eeecrcecercee eves 96 :
6. Fragment of Pivot Grammar of One Child . . «+ «ee +e» 107
7a Substitution of Phrase for First Member of Open-Open
Sentence .-«ee-ererrerevveevreevr eer eee eee # © @ @ 108
7 Substitution of Phrase for Second Member of Open-Open
Sentence -_ e e a e e e * * e @ ° eo a e e @ e a e s a © o * ® 109
8. Emergence of Noun Phrases .. 22+ eeeeeeceee ee 6 110
9. Negation Stage I... ee eee cece reer ee evo ee se ID
10. Negation Stage II ..+e«eeere eee eee eee eee 3
| 11. Negation Stage IIIT... 2 ceececcrccereeeececreceose Ji
12. Negation Stage IV ..-2«2e2eeeere ee ee eee eo © © FBS
13. Classification of Imitation Situations (from Slobin, 1964). 17
14. A Partial Checklist of Potential Taboo Domains (after
Kany, 1960) ...cecesceceecveerereececerserves 185
vii
INTRODUCTION
This field manual is intended to guide investigators in the col-
lection of comparable cross-linguistic and cross-cultural data on the
acquisition of communicative competence. It thus represents a joint
endeavor in developmental psycho- and sociolinguistics, for we are
concerned both with children's acquisition of linguistic codes and the
social rules for the use of such codes.
‘ There have recently been numerous studies employing modern lin-
guistic concepts in the study of early language development in chil-
dren (reviewed in Ervin-Tripp, 1966). Some longitudinal studies have
explored the sound system (e.g. Burling, 1959; Gvozdev, 1948); others
have examined syntactic development (e.g. Braine, 19632; Brown &
Fraser, 1963; Gvozdev, 1949; Miller & Ervin, 1964). In same cases
cross-sectional methods have been employed (e.g. Berko, 1958; Templin,
1957), establishing norms for age changes in a particular language
comunity. These studies have raised many questions about how children
learn the coniplex linguistic system of any lenguage rapidly, during the
same years, and yet reveal relatively small variation in rates of ac-
quisition though there are large variations in practice and exposure to
speech. We believe that there are three major gaps in our research on
language development.
We need information about the learning of languages which are
structurally different from English. There have been proposals (e.g.
Chomsky, 1965, 1966, 1967; McNeill, 1966a,b) that certain grammatical
structures are universal, and that certain universal cognitive abili-
ties are likely to be involved in language learning. We may also find
certain universals in terms of stages of development in children
(Jakobson, 1941). All of the recent American studies of syntax have
found that at a very early stage children have "pivot" grammrs —
(Braine, 1963a) consisting of classes of a few words which occupy com-
plementary positions. For example, in a given child's grammar, where
or there may always come first in sentences, and up and off may always
come last. English has rather variable absolute position of words--
certainly off and up do not always occupy sentence final position. An
even more interesting example is the learning of Russian. The scanty
evidence available suggests that Russian children also have pivot
grammars at first, even though Russian word order is extremely variable,
since it is a language which, like Latin, employs inflectional affixes
rather than order for many basic grammatical relations (Slobin, 1966a,
in press). Therefore the pivot grammars cannot arise from imitation.
The variety of systems in natural languages is so great that the
study of language acquisition in varying languages can be regarded as
a natural experiment which it would be extremely difficult to simulate
artificially. For example, American Indian languages have far more
complex verb inflections and verb morphophonemics than English but we
do not know about child language development in any American Indian
The Introduction was written by Susan M. Ervin-Tripp.
ix
language. The attempt to simulate primary language learning with an
artificial language is manifestly extremely difficult, and so far ex-
periments of this sort have been very limited in scope, have studied
older children,and have essentially been second language studies.
There is reason to believe that first and second language learning may
be quite different, and that one cannot generalize from one to the
other.
The second desideratum is that language acquisition studies be
broadened to include not only the traditional formal core of language,
but competence in the use of language. Not only do children learn the
phonology, grammar and vocabulary which permit us to identify a lan-
guage, but they learn when to speak, when to be quiet, when to use
ritual language, when to use baby talk, when to use polite forms, and
when to shift language in @ multilingual community. We know nothing
about the relation between these aspects of learning and the learning
of the basic code, but it is clear that instruction about when to vo-
calize and when to be silent can begin even before language begins.
Differentiated style according to the age of addressee can be seen in
children under three, as shown in baby talk addressed only to infants,
polite requests only to older children or adults, and systematic dif-
ferentiation of multi lingual usage.
The uses of language may vary considerably in different cultures.
Theoretical discussion of one aspect of functional variation has be-
come well known through the writing of Basil Bernstein (1961a,b; 1962,
1964). In brief, he argues that members of closed social networks use
"restricted codes” which are highly redundant. In contrast, members
of open networks and their children can switch to an "elaborated code”
which is less redundant, uses more complex and varied forms of sub-
ordination, and relies on vocabulary and syntax more than on voice
quality and paralinguistic signals for differentiating meaning. Under -
these formal contrasts there appear to be differences in the
usual functions of language. The acquisition of full competence in
writing requires the acquisition of an elaborated code, so analysis of
these code differences may pe very important in studying literacy.
There has been increasing attention recently by anthropologists
to the formal description of rules of speech in terms of social vari-
ables such as rank, age, and sex of addressee, and occasion, which
condition alternation in speech (for references, see Gumperz, 196523
Hymes, 1964). There has,e1so been a characterization of certain
structural relations or sequences in speech events such as greetings,
thanks, conversation, introduction, and narration. To qualify as 4
native speaker in a speech commmity one must learn these rules as well
as the rules of grammar. This is to say, of course, that one must
jearn to behave as though one knew the rules. Assessment of the ac-
quisition of this competence should be as fundamental to the study of
language development as the study of the formal grammatical code.
alana braaihteiinaaiwes aes etme 6
ner
The study of sociolinguistic rules is in its infancy, so we are
thrown back on ethnographic notes and queries rather than on precise
hypotheses and methods as devices for directing field workers. One of
our goals in this research is to obtain sufficient ethnographic data
to provide a basis for comparative discussion among the field workers.
This portion of the Field Manual must constitute early steps towards
a sociolinguistic theory.
There has been considerable controversy over the role of the so-
cial milieu in language development (Lenneberg, 1967). The controversy
turns on the degree to which a strong maturational component in language
development may make linguistic competence relatively impervious to ac-
celeration through changes in milieu. The linguistic repertoire of the
community clearly must influence the content of the child's learning,
but it is not clear whether the order of acquisition of granmatical or
sociolinguistic rules might be altered either by their place in the
adult system or by specific values and practices of the child’s care~-
takers. These practices include prohibiting or encouraging the child's
presence when various speech events occur, and stimulating or respond-
ing to his speech.
In advance, it is not clear how one would devise universal measures
of rate of development, in order to test hypotheses about the relation
of milieu and language development. However, if we are able to find
situations in which natural variations exist within communities, as in
the United States, one can provide a rough assessment of such effects.
We regard experimental manipulation (Cazden, 1965) as desirable when
some of the possible features of influence have been identified. But
some kinds of manipulation are ethically impossible, thoug: they are
found often in nature. For example, variations in family structure can
easily be studied, including presence and absence of father or mother,
presence of extended family acting as socializers, peer groups who are
kin or primarily non-kin. Labov's work (1965) suggests that after five
the peer group may be the primary source of language socialization.
An example of social effects on language development can be found
in the studies of sex differences in the rate of language development.
Puerto Rican language development in general is faster than in matched
English-speaking groups in New York, and no sex differences appeared
(Anastasi & de Jestis, 1953) though girls were superior in the white
sample, and boys in a Negro sample (Anastasi & D'Angelo, 1952) in New
York; in Detroit (Thomas, 1962) also in a Negro lower-class sample,
boys were extremely handicapped. It seems quite evident that the
causes for these differential developmental rates are social, but we
have too little information about relevant features of the social en-
vironment to draw any conclusions.
The first phase of this research is inevitably descriptive. There
has never been a systematic study of language socialization, including
the milieu and sociolinguistic competence. Ethnographies usually lack
much information about family interaction, especially in urban settings,
because it occurs relatively privately. As we indicated earlier, some
xi
NN eeeeEeEeEeEeeeeeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEEeEeEeEeeEeEeEeEeEeEeEc—eee
studies comparing language development rates in different groups in the 4
United States cannot be interpreted because we lack information about
their language socialization practices. 7
The material on language development in the narrow sense, which
will include considerable text collection from a small group of children, ~~
will permit cross-linguistic comparisons of the development of struc- — |
tured systems. In these cases, differences may derive from differences -
in linguistic structure.
The outcome of the initial fieldwork laid forth in this manual will *
allow for: (1) generalization about development of given linguistic
features in given languages, on the basis of a very small set of tests oe
and a sufficient sample to support preliminary generalization; (2) dis-
confirmation of assumptions about universals in development or milieu,
and suggestions of new hypotheses about possible universals, either ed:
descriptive or structural, hitherto unnoticed; (3) data for building |
a sociolinguistic theory; and (4) further work in the same and carefully “
selected comparable field sites. Such further work will be devoted to
the collection of larger samples for descriptive purposes, and will ex-
plore antecedent-consequent relations in cultures where internal vari- 2
ations in antecedent (milieu) variables are found. For example, if we
are to study the learning of sociolinguistic rules in any detail, we
need more work in each culture on characterizing the relevant rules.
In the first phase of the work, outlined here, we place a different
fieldworker at each site. In later stages, detailed cross-cultural
testing of particular hypotheses might require collaboration between a
traveling specialist and teams of local fieldworkers at established
and well-studied sites.
This field manual is the joint product of the authors, and is in-
tended to provide a guide for them as they do their first fieldwork on
these problems.* It is also intended as a guide for others who may
wish to contribute to our small store of knowedge on these problems.
In picking new field sites for the use of this manual, an important
consideration is the availability of an adequate linguistic descrip-
tion of the local language. In terms of training and site selection
it would be difficult to improve on the advice offered by Margaret
Mead over 35 years to those who would study "the primitive child":
The student should have training in both anthropo..ogy
and psychology, with an emphasis in psychology upon
social, child, and abnormal psychology. Experience
in psychiatric case work, especially among children,
or in teaching, will prove more valuable than a
knowledge of laboratory methods and equipment which
it is almost impossible to use in the field. The
anthropological training should emphasize particularly S|
work in social organization--analyses of kinship
+
Major writers of sections of the Manual are indicated on the first ~
page of each section. The entire Manual was extensively edited by
Dan I. Slobin.
xii
systems, a sufficient knowledge of primitive religion to
familiarize the student with the alien concepts which he
will encounter, and a good training in linguistics. (‘The
ability to learn language quickly and a high memory span
for nonsense material are perhaps the two most necessary
native abilities for this type of work.) A detailed
kmowledge of the ethnography of the area chosen is also
necessary. A student whose training is primarily in
psychology [or, we might add, in linguistics] would be
wise to choose an area which has been well described
ethnologically . . . The choice of an area which has al-
ready been described has also the advantage that the con-
ditions will be known, the problem can be phrased in ad-
vance in terms of the culture. _
For those, however, with a broader ethnological train-
ing and interest, other cautions hold. . . . the final choice
of a working location must be made from nearby, and be based
upon exact information concerning the size of the commnity
and the residential arrangements. For example, 4 detailed
study of children could not be made in Dobu, where each
village comprises only ten or fifteen people, and the members
of each village are hostile to the members of other villages.
Cultural attitudes towards children should be ascertained, if
possible. For most purposes, it is better to work in a region
where children are regarded as the most natural interest for
adults than in a place where a man of rank is never supposed
to speak to a child. A male investigator should try to find a
region where the fathers play en important domestic rule. A
woman investigator should attempt to discover the native atti-
tudes toward barrenness and marital status in relation to their
power of bringing good or bad luck to children, and then dis-
close herself as single, widowed, divorced, the mother of twins
left with their grandmother, or whatever fable is most likely
to give the natives confidence in her (1931, pp. 685-6).
We urge anybody planning to take the Field Manual to a field site
to choose a location where there are current research field stations.
Te number of such field stations is increasing, and information about
_ them can be obtained from the Whitings at Harvard or from other anthro-
pologists doing comparative work. The advantages of working at an estab-
lished site are that initial work on censuses and basic ethnography will
pe available, and local well-trained collaborators will be at hand. Work
along the lines of this manual could also be done fruitfully within the
highly varied speech communities in western cultures, for example, com-
munities of immigrants, the deaf, American Indians, and so on.
Before going to actual field sites, it is a good idea for all who
intend to use this manual to try out all of the methods they plan to
use with appropriate families nearby, preferably sufficiently distinct
in culture and language as to provide a fair anticipation of later
xiii
ae
field problems. Any comparative work must require some procedural
standardization, and it is highly necessary to have prior communication
about difficulties before fieldwork begins. Conditions in the field
interfere with standardization in several ways. In terms of physical
and social setting, the investigator is increasingly removed from the
frame of reference in which he first discussed these problems; there-
fore investigators become more unlike each other in the field setting.
Communication with others whose data must be the basis for comparative
reports is much more aifficult for a variety of reasons. The severe
demands of settling into a new community and establishing rapport make
it very likely that investigators will surrender all efforts at a com-
mon set of aims and procedures unless very explicit prior commitments
are made. These are likely to be especially severe problems for
anthropologists wnose relativistic ideology may make it seem & positive
good to depart from the common frame of reference established prior to
departure for the field. The Field Manual is meant to be a shared com-
mitment restraining these forces.” Pilot studies within the home
country can permit the investigators to cope with some of these strains
while still in the work group. For this reason we recommend that any
investigators not in our initial group write to us about any ambigui-
ties they find doing pilot work from the Manual, in order to make our
studies as comparable as possible. Comments about the Manual, re-
quests for copies and for tapes to be used in the phonological imitation
procedures, and information about related studies should be addressed to
Dr. Dan I. Slobin, Department of Psychology, University of California,
Berkeley 94720.
Throughout our work on the Manual, in 1966 and 1967, we have been
given a home in the Institute of Human Learning of the University of
California at Berkeley, to which we express our gratitude. Since the
first draft of the Manual was prepared, funds from Contract 4-7-008757-
2015 with the U.S. Office of Education have enabled us to try out
procedures locally. Through Project Literacy, the Office of Education
also indirectly financed a series of consultative meetings about the
problems raised by the draft manual. Many generous colleagues have
given freely of their time and counsel, either through visits or letters
--or both. These include Harriet Amster, Ursula Bellugi, Noam Chomsky,
Aaron Cicourel, A. Richard Diebold, Jr., Joe Dillard, Charles A.
Ferguson, Robert Hess, Dell Hymes, Vera John, Edward S. Klima, Eric H.
Lenneberg, William Labov, David McNeill, Wick Miller, Michael Moerman,
Harry Osser, Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Shegeloff, Elizabeth F. Shipley,
Tatiana Slama-Cazacu, Carlota S. Smith, William Soskin, William Stewart,
as All fieldworkers are urged to supplement this manual with the
Field guide for a study of socialization (Whiting et al., 1966), used
by the Harvard study of child rearing in six cultures. That manual
contains many valuable suggestions on the study of socialization and 5
fieldwork in general, and is referred to at various places in our
manual. Another useful aid is W. J. Samarin's Field linguistics
(1967), to which we also refer the reader for additional advice.
xiv
and Beatrice Whiting. As a result of their advice we made changes in
the Manual, and learned from them much more which may influence the
work of those present at our meetings. We wish we could specify more
precisely each of the great variety of valuable contributions we have
received. (Responsibility for the final contents of the Manual, of
course, lies with us.)
The Social Science Research Council, through the Committee on
Sociolinguistics, has helped finance the fieldwork in this study with
funds from the National Science Foundation. Recipients of such aid
have been Jan Brukman, in a Koya-speaking village in India, and
Claudia Mitchell, in a working-class Negro section of Oakland, Cali-
fornia. In 1967-68 Carolyn Wardrip will study middle-class white
families in Berkeley, and David Argoff will compare Finnish and
Russian-speaking families in Finland and the Soviet Union. In addi-
tion, Brian Stross in Chiapas, Mexico, and Keith Kernan in Samoa will
carry out field manual studies under separate sponsorship. Clerical
assistance is being provided by Rachel Holmen. The group will re-
assemble in the summer of 1968, with others who have done similar re-
search, to prepare a third revision of the manual for publication, and
to work on problems of data analysis. We are grateful for the extensive
support which has been available in these initial phases of our compara-
tive research. We view this project, though it began in Berkeley, as an
effort at national and international collaboration, and welcome others
who wish to join in the various phases of our work.
Coane Prresasssress My
es . mee
PART ONE ‘
MAJOR TOPICS OF INVESTIGATION
1.0 RESEARCH SCHEDULE
There are fourteen major areas of investigation which constitute
the core of this field manual. All researchers are expected to collect
comparable data on these central topics, following the schedule of
activities presented below as closely as possible. In addition to the
major topics, the researcher is encouraged to refer frequently to the
"notes and queries" section presented at the end of Part One (1.7), and
to be constantly alert to the theoretical considerations and possible
subsidiary studies presented in Part Three. A number of important
methodological factors are spelled out in Fart Two, and the Appendices
contain examples of specific tests and procedures. The investigator
should read through the manual at least once a month during his stay in
the field.
A core sample of 24 children, between the ages of six months and
13 years, will serve as subjects and informants for the central investi-
gation, along with a number of adults in the community, including the
mothers of some of the children. Each of the major topics is taken up
in detail, following an initial outline of the schedule of research
activities to be undertaken in the field. This schedule presupposes @
twelve-month field visit, leaving the first month free for orientation,
and the last month to make up for inevitable slippages in the schedule,
transcription of materials gathered at the end of the stay, etc.
At the time of beginning formal research (the second month in our
schedule) the investigator should have some knowledge of the language,
should have selected a native assistant (see Section 2.3), and should
have designed the research materials for topics IV, VII, VIII, and IX.
The schedule is arranged so that the first contacts with child subjects
are with older children (3;4 - 7 years), in order to facilitate entry
into the world of child speech. Table 1 presents the list of research
tasks; Table 2 the distribution of children across topics; and Table 3
the 12-month time schedule.
Section 1.0 was written by Dan I. Slobin.
1
ee |
*
Table 1. Major Research Tasks
I. Determine level of motor development [1.1].
II. Record babbling [1.2.3].
III. Elicit and record imitation of prosodic aspects of speech
according to standardized tests [1.2.2].
crete NE GARR ERED TER LIL SOLD SOL LIL BOT
Iv. Elicit and record imitation of phonological aspects of speech
according to standardized tests [1.2.2, 1.3.1].
VY. Elicit and list initial vocabulary [1.2.4, 1.3.1].
VI. Record free interaction between child and mother (or mother- _ =
surrogate) for intensive grammatical analysis [1.4.1].
VII. Elicit and record imitation of systematically constructed
model sentences [1.4.2].
VIII. Administer standard speech comprehension tests [1.4.3].
IX. Elicit and record production of grammatical speech according
to standardized tests [1.4.4].
X. Describe child's interaction networks and standard daily
activities, over the course of a year, on the basis of
observation and interview of child and parents [1.5.1].
XI. Record and observe dialogs between children [1.5.2).
XII. Record speech of mother to child [1.5.3].
XIII. Observe communicative routines [1.5.4].
XIV. Interview adults concerning beliefs about language acquisition
and use [1.6].
7 Figures in square brackets refer to descriptions of data-gathering
techniques to be found in Part One of the Field Manual.
In Table 2 each child receives a letter designation, which serves to
identify him in the subsequent text. In noting ages, a semicolon separates
years from months; a conma should be used to separate months from days:
e.g. a child of age 23;10,13 is two years, ten months, and thirteen days
old. The investigator should attempt to find children as close to the
ages given as possible; the tolerance range should be about one month
(in those societies where exact ages of children are known). Column XIV
refers to the child's mother. Research months are counted from arrival
in the fiela. (If the field stay is longer than 12 months, the re-
searcher may wish to begin the formal schedule later than the second
month; however, at least one free month should be left at the end for
unforeseen circumstances. )
Table 2. Distribution of Children by Age, Sex, and Task
~~ First
Child|Age |Sex|I}IZ| IIL) IV] V| VI} VIL|VIT| X|x XI} XII|XIII|XIV|Research
Month
: A 1036] M [+) +) + I+ + + + }+ 3
B 1036) F I+} +) + I+ + +) +i] + 4
Cc *% | M I+ + i+ }+ + + + | + 6
D * | F I+ + I+ i+ + + +] + 6
E x | # [+ + +] + | + | th+ + + | + 3
q F % | & I+ + +] +] +i+ + +/+ h
G |2;0] M {+ + +] +] Fi+] + + 3
: H {23;0| F {+ + +] + | +]+] + + 3
| I |2;8] M i+ + +] i +i+] + + 3
| J |2;8] F j+ + + | + | +i+] + + 3
K 1334) M {+ + + | + | t]+] + + 2
L |334) F I+ + +1 +) +l+l + + 2
: M {4321 M j+ + + {| +] +i+] + ~ 2
N |43;2] F I+ + + {+ | ++} + + | + 2
0 {5 M +] + + 2
P |5 | F +| + + 2
| Q I7 M +] +1 + + | + 2
| | R 17 |F +) +{ +] +] + 2
. s 19 M +| + + 3
| tT 19 | F +) + + 3
u jn iM +) + + 3
YY tae ig +] + + 3
a w (13 | M +| + + 3
X 13 | F +1 + * 3
4 Note: The age of children C and D is indeterminate; they should be
c} early in the one-word stage, and have a limited vocabulary. Children E
and F are not picked on the basis of age, but mean-utterance length, as
described in 1.4.1; their sex is not important, but they should both be
of the same sex.
For each child studied, the investigator should prepare a dossier
containing such information as the following:
name “
birthdate (or closest approximation)
sex
handedness
general physical description (accompanied by photographs )
general mood description
any relevant pathology or abnormality
level of motor development (see Table 4)
articulateness and quality of speech and voice
family situation |
parents living? | p> ts
parents’ ages
number, ages, and sexes of siblings
people living in household and their relation to child
relevant kin living elsewhere
status and occupation of family and its members
description, photographs, and map of dwelling
* tn some field situations the investigator may not be able to as-
certain the exact date of birth of a child, or even its general age.
In such cases, try to determine the time of the child's birth in re-
gard to a season, a festival, a special event, an historical occasion,
or the like. It may also be helpful to ascertain the child's age
relative to other children for whom more precise information is avail-
able. Some guides to estimation of children's ages can be found in
Bayler and Bayley (1959), Krogman (1941, 1958), and Watson and Lowrey
(1951, esp. pp. 44-76). Bayler and Bayley present height and weight
curves and graphic growth records for boys and girls (charts available
from Medical Dept., Ross Laboratories, Columbus 16, Ohio). However,
it should be borne in mind that such statistics vary with race and
environment. Krogman (1958, pp. 52-67) lists many references on environ-
mental, racial, and dietetic influences upon physical growth; and
Krogman (1941) gives many tables on season, diet, health (pp. 704-801),
and socioeconomic status and rural-urban contrast (pp. 802-857) in
relation to growth measures. Behavioral indices of age are probably
more useful cross-culturally than are morphological indices.
x
A more detailed outline of this part of the dossier is given in
1.5.1.
Table 3. 12-Month Time Schedule
| Child
Nonth|A BC DE F GHig«kKoL-MNOPQRS TUV WX
1
2 KLM No P @R
3 la” By GHIdJ sTtTuVW xX.
¥ *
h B F K LM N
*
E
*%
5 Ia GHIJ
%
6 Bc*p*E K LM N
¥* *
7 IA FGHId
*
E
8 RY K LM N
*
9 cDE GHIdJ
: *
10 F OP QR
} *
{ e
~ 11 GHIdJ s TUVW X
j 12
| * wotes: Asterisk after child's initial in a given month means that mother
is also to be studied in that month--either to record her speech to the child
a or to interview her concerning beliefs about language acquisition and use
XIV), as shown in Table 2. Horizontal lines indicate months; because E is to
be visited every 6 weeks, he frequently falls on the line between months.
1.1. MOTOR DEVELOPMENT
There is good reason to believe that, in normal children, speech
and motor development follow temporally related maturational sequences.
This thesis is most clearly developed by Eric Lenneberg, in his recent
pook, Biological foundations of language (1967):
The onset of speech consists of a gradual unfolding of
capacities; it is a series of generally well-circumscribed
events which take place between the second and third year of
life. Certain important speech milestones are reached in a
fixed sequence and at a relatively constant chronological age.
Just as impressive as the age constancy is the remarkable
synchronization of speech milestones with motor -developmental
milestones . .. (p. 127).
In Table 4, below, we reproduce Lenneberg's Table 4.1 (pp. 128-130),
in which this “temporal interlocking of speech milestones and motor mile-
stones" is revealed. It is evident that cross-cultural research is needed
to validate Lenneberg's assertion that this developmental sequence is
universal. :
The categories presented under "Vocalization and Language" in the
table are clear. The investigator should be certain that his sample
includes children demonstrating the forms of vocal and verbal behavior
summarized there. With the exception of the very youngest infants,
children A-N should satisfy the requirements of these categories, and
they are marked appropriately under column I in Table 2. Neonates
should be found for the 12-, -, and 20-week-old entries in Lenneberg's
table. The descriptions of stages of motor development in that table
are likewise quite clear, and the investigator should have little diffi-
culty designing simple tests to determine the motor milestones described
by Lenneberg. (Watson and Lowrey [1951, pp. 87-99] also present norms of
behavioral development, including motor, adaptive, language, and personal-
social milestones. )
Table 4. Developmental Milestones in Motor and
Language Development (from Lenneberg, 1967 )
At the con- 7
pletion of: Motor Development Vocalization and Language ,
12 weeks Supports head when in prone Markedly less crying than at 8
position; weight is on ei- weeks; when talked to and nodded
bows; hands mostly open; no at, smiles, followed by squealing- j
grasp reflex. gurgling sounds usually called
cooing, which is vowel-like in ).
character and pitch-modulated; |
sustains cooing for 15-20 seconds.
Section 1.1 was written by Dan I. Slobin.
Table 4. (cont.)
Motor Development
Vocalization and Language
At the com-
pletion of:
| 16 weeks
] 20 weeks
a 6 months
8 months
10 months
Plays with a rattle placed
in his hands (by shaking
it and staring at it),
head self-supported; tonic
neck reflex subsiding.
Sits with props.
Sitting: bends forward
and uses hands for sup-
port; can bear weight
when put into standing
position, but cannot
yet stand with holding
on; reaching: unilateral;
grasp: no thumb apposi-
tion yet; releases cube
when given another.
Stands holding on; grasps
with thumb apposition;
picks up pellet with thumb
and finger tips.
Creeps efficiently; takes
side-steps, holding on;
pulls to standing posi-
tion.
Responds to human sounds
more definitely; turns head;
eyes seem to search for
speaker; occasionally some
chuckling sounds.
The vowel-like cooing sounds
begin to be interspersed
with more consonantal sounds ;
labial fricatives, spirants
and nasals ere common;
acoustically, 211 vocaliza-
tions are very different
from the sounds of the
mature language of the en-
vironment.
Cooing changing into
babbling resembling one-
syllable utterances ;
neither yowels nor conso~
nants have very fixed recur-
rences; most common utter-
ances sound somewhat like ma,
mu, da, or di.
Reduplication (or more con-
tinuous repetitions) becomes
frequent; intonation pat-
terns become distinct; ut-
terances can signal emphasis
and emotions.
Vocalizations are mixed with
sound-play such as gurgling
or bubble-blowing; appears
to wish to imitate sounds,
but the imitations are never
quite successful; beginning
to differentiate between
words heard by making differ-
ential adjustment.
Table 4. (cont.)
At the can-
pletion of:
Motor Development
Vocalization and Language
12 months
18 months
24 months
Walks when held by one
hand; walks on feet and
hands--knees in air;
mouthing of objects al-
most stopped; seats self
on floor.
Grasp, prehension and re-
lease fully developed; gait
stiff, propulsive and pre-
cipitated; sits on child's
chair with only fair aim;
creeps downstairs backward;
has difficulty building
tower of three cubes.
Runs, but falls in sudden
turns; can quickly alter-
nate between sitting and
stance; walks stairs up
or down, one foot forward
only.
Identical sound sequences are
replicated with higher rela-
tive frequency of occurrence
and words (mamma or dadda) are
emerging; definite signs of
understanding some words and
simple commands (show me your
eyes ).
Has a definite repertoire of
words--more than three, but
less than fifty; still much
babbling but now of several
syllables with intricate into-
nation pattern; no attempt at
communicating information and
no frustration for not being
understood; words may include
items such as thank you or
come here, but there is little
ability to join any of the
lexical items into spontaneous
two-item phrases; understand-
ing is progressing rapidly.
Vocabulary of more than 50
items (some children seem to
be able to name everything in
environment); begins sponta-
neously to join vocabulary
items into two-word phrases;
all phrases appear to be own
creations; definite increase
in communicative behavior and
interest in language.
Table 4.
(cont. )
At the con-
pletion of:
Motor Development
Vocalization and Language
30 months Jumps into air with both Fastest increase in vocabulary
feet; stands on one foot with many new acditions every
for about two seconds; day; no babbling at all; utter-
takes few steps on tip- ances have communicative in-
tee; jumps from chair; tent; frustrated if not under-
good hand and finger co- stood by adults; utterances
ordination; can move consist of at least two words,
digits independently; many have three or even five
manipulation of objects words; sentences and phrases
much improved; builds have characteristic child
tower of six cubes. grammar, that is, they are
rarely verbatim repetitions of
an adult utterance; intelli-
gibility is not very good yet,
though there is great varia-
tion among children; seems to
understand everything that is
said to him.
3 years Tiptoes three yards; runs Vocabulary of some 1000 words ;
smoothly with accelera- about 80% of utterances are
tion and deceleration; intelligible even to strangers;
negotiates sharp and fast grammatical complexity of ut-
curves without difficulty; terences is roughly that of
walks stairs by alternat- colloquial adult language, al-
ing feet; jumps 12 inches; though mistakes still occur.
can operate tricycle.
k years Jumps over rope; hops on Language is well-established;
right foot; catches ball
in arms; walks line.
deviations from the adult norm
tend to be mere in style than
in grammar.
Note that chronological age is really not crucial to the comparisons
required by Teble 4. What is important is to determine whether motor and
speech milestones interlock in the manner presented above. A chart should
be prepared for each vhild, indicating his age as closely as possible,
evidence of his level of motor development, and a brief description of the
main features of his vocal and verbal behavior.
Lenneberg has done preliminary cross-cultural study of the questions
raised here, and the fieldworker will be aided by his observations:
How universal in human society is the onset of speech?
Do cultural attitudes toward child-rearing influence the
emergence of speech, or are there languages that are either
so complicated that no one can master oral communication until
puberty, or so primitive that the entire system is learned by
every child before he begins to toddle? . . . Strangely enough,
the onset of speech has rarely been & subject of a detailed
the vocalizations or communicative behavior among the children
of "primitive" and "western" man. I have investigated this
problem further with the cooperation of several students in an-
thropology (Samuel Putnam, Mary Ann Whelan, and Eleanor Crocker )
who made direct field observations among the Dani of Dutch New
Guinea, the Zuni of the American Southwest, and the Bororo of
Central Brazil. :
In these investigations, children were given tests of
sensory-motor development such as coordination for reaching,
nature of the grasp, and the ability to walk, stand on one leg,
or throw a ball. Tape recordings were made of the vocalizations
of the babies before they appeared to possess the common lan-
guage, as well as of their utterances throughout their physical
development to age three. In addition, information was obtained
from native informants about the linguistic competence of the
various children studied, their fluency, types of mistakes in
articulation, syntax, and choice of words, and information was
gathered on the parents’ attitude toward their children's speech
development. In some instances, the chronological age of the
child studied was not known, and therefore neither the motor nor
the language achievements could be compared directly with the
age of emergence in American children. But the chronological
age was not as important as the question of whether develop-
mental progress, gauged upon the emergence of definite motor
skills, marked also the beginning and major milestones of the
child's speech development, and whether the concordance be-
tween speech and motor development observed in western children
were also found in children of these cultures. As far as we
can judge from the analysis of the material, the answer is
clearly yes. The first words appear at about the time that
walking is accomplished, and by the time a child is able to
jump down from a chair (or its equivalent), tiptoe, or walk
backward three yards, he is reported by the informants to be
communicating fluently, even though certain inaccuracies and
childlike usages seem always to persist for a longer period.
Anthropologists have pointed out that the label "primitive
" 4s misleading when applied to any natural living
language. The developmental studies here support the view that
no natural language is inherently more complicated or simpler
to learn by a growing child than any other language. There
seems to be no reletion between progress in language acquisi-
= na culturally determined aspects of language (1967, pp-
-9).
It is our hope that users of this Field Manual will gather fur-
ther evidence in regard to the provocative thesis developed by
Lenneberg.
1.2. LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT: PHONOLOGY
| 1.2.1. Definitions
It is common usage in modern American research to refer to three
stages of development of infant sounds. Cooing refers to a particular
} type of sound which is frequent in the firs year. It is distin-
, guished from crying, from fussing, and from organic sounds like belch-
ing. For definitions of the other categories, see Lenneberg, Rebelsky,
and Nichols (1965). Cooing sounds are primarily vocalic. If consonan-
tal sounds are heard at this stage, they most often are back consonants
or continuants, such as nasals. Cooing has 4 slow onset and therefore
( gives the impression of leisurely, pleasurable sound. Experimental
evidence suggests that by three months of age cooing can be increased
in frequency by social reinforcement. At any event it steadily in-
creases, while crying decreases, in observational studies.
Babbling tends to replace cooing, sometimes as early as three
months, but more usuelly after six months. Babbling refers to vocal-
izing which gives the impression of syllabic repetition. There are
repetitions of brief sounds, rather than long gradually changing vowels,
and there is closure of the vocal apparatus, with much more precise use
of the articulators, such as tongue and lips. While the babbling may
sound to a casual listener a lot like adult syllables, ©.g- { dadada]
= or [bababa], an observer may be surprised to see different articulation
- from adults, e.g. a tongue protruding between the lips.
Speech begins when there is a consistent meaning for the child's
utterances other than a broad affective category, though the phonetic
variation for a morpheme may be wide at first. The report of the
child's caretakers is probably the best clue that the child has
speech. There is sometimes a4 relatively silent period between
babbling and the onset of speech, and the child with speech may have
simpler and less frequent utterances than he did when babbling.
Once speech appears, there are sequences which cannot be glossed,
which one can call gibberish or nonsense. It is not known whether
nonsense employs a wider repertoire of sounds than meaningful speech,
and therefore is more like babbling in form.
1.2.2. Imitation
Imitation data permit the writing of precise input-output rules
and therefore may allow rapid collection of much more complete infor-
mation on @ child's system than would be obtained from spontaneous
speech alone. The rule structure my be slightly different than the
system for perception or production alone, of course.
Children too young to instruct to imitate frequently do so spon-
taneously, or can be trained to do so. Training consists of rewarding
Section 1.2 was written by Susan M. Ervin-Tripp.
any spontaneous instances which seem close to imitation, and gradually
"shaping" better imitation until the child responds imitatively with
fair frequency. As in other procedures, one may note certain times of
day or special circumstances when the child seems more ready to imi-
tate. Wait until the child is freely imitating live voices before
setting up equipment for imitation of recorded stimuli. One must thus
be prepared to bring in the imitation procedure, or to end it, accord~-
ing to the child's oscillating whims.
|For children C-N, the tape recorder itself will be a distraction
and will orient the child away from the voice and toward the machinery.
Give the child experience in listening to a preparation tape first.
This includes music, odd sounds, and voices speaking nonsense. When
the noveltywears off, the child may be ready to attend to tapes de-
signed to test his imitations.
As a practical matter, we have prepared a set of stimulus tapes.
The use of the same tapes in all field sites will allow comparisons
of results. We can include a wider range of material than would be
possible if we were confined to oral stimuli provided by the field-
workers and their,assistants. The stimulus tapes can be purchased
from the authors. These tapes consist of a set of three-inch reels
with contents as follows:
Tape contents Child informants
A-B C-D-E F-J K-N
) Preparation x x x
| Vowels and prosody x x
) Single consonants x x x
) Disyllabic patterns x x
Clusters x x x
Trisyllabic patterns x x
The preparation tape is used to accustom the child to listening
to the recorder rather than handling it. The prosody section con-
tains intonation patterns and other suprasegmental variations. The
vowel section contrasts high and low, front and back, rounded and un-
rounded vowels. The consonant and cluster tapes provide examples of
highly frequent initial consonants or clusters, and the multisyllabic
patterns employ simple components but combined in complex ways to
test assimilation.
Procedure
Continue training and preparation until the child seems ready to
respond. The stimulus tapes are run on a second tape recorder, if
necessary on a small cartridge machine. The usual machine is employed
for recording the child's responses. In order to conserve response
tape, start and stop the response machine only when the child is
producing by the criterion for his age, as indicated below.
. Available from Dr. Dan I. Slobin, Department of Psychology,
University of California, Berkeley 94720.
ad
response. For C-N, there must be evidence that the vocalization is 4
result of orientation to the stimulus. First, keep distracting people
and objects away in any testing session. Use the preparation tape till
talk about. ‘The child's caretaker can tell you if the child is talking
about something else, and not paying attention to the sounds. If re-
sponses are present bearing & rough similarity to the input to con-
vince you the child is listening, then the responses are acceptable.
Sampling
stimilus pattern. If the child responds several times to a pattern,
so much the better. These repetitions will allow some assessment of
the stability of his substitution patterns. On the chart, the chil-
dren are given between two and four input tapes in all, so sam chil-
dren must be tested more than others. Since no transcription is
necessary, the field time consists only of the recording. During the
recording, keep some written notes to help distinguish pairs that
sound alike on tape like p-k.
1.2.3. Babb
According to several theories, babbling should gradually become
aifferentiated in different linguistic milieux. This prediction has
never been tested, though some current work in spectrographic analysis
of babbling tapes from different milieux is being carried out. In
order to test this hypothesis, one needs samples of speech addressed
to the infants, as well as samples of their pabbling. The speech
They hear establishes a baseline for judging the differences in input
to the children. Such data will be collected in the studies of baby
talk (1.5.3). Since it will be used for acoustic analysis, care must
be taken to avoid echoes and background noise. A Lavalier microphone
on the neck of the caretaker, on the excuse it is used for listening
to the child, might give best results.
Babbling samples should be collected in standard situations:
half just after feeding, and half while handling objects. To maxi-
mize the variety of sounds collected, try to accumulate a total of
about thirty minutes of pabbling in three minute samples. Probably
stimulation by others. Avoid background noises where possible, even
by bringing the infant into a different setting, unless vocalizing
seems to be reduced then. There will be three such tapes of children
A and B at bi-monthly intervals. If the recording of the babbling
occurs in the midst of other taping, & stopwatch might be used, with
a "time in action” attachment, to keep & running record of how many
pabbling minutes have been collected. Note that these tapes require
no processing in the field, since they will be used for laboratory
analysis at home. ode
14
1.2.4. Speech Samples
The speech samples collected for the st of vocabulary in chil-
dren C and D (1.3.1) and syntax in E and F (1.4.1) should be of such
quality as to allow later phonological analysis. For this to be the
case, two criteria are necessary, good quality acoustically and suf-
ficient range of sampling.
It is of particular importance for these tapes to be of good
acoustic quality since it will be more important to hear phonological
details than in the tapes of the oldest children. For purposes of
the phonological analysis, the mturalness of the recording situation
is less important for a young child than the lack of noise in the
background, and the lack of metallic or other polished surfaces nearby
for the reflection of the high pitched voice of the child. If pos-
sible, keep the microphone near the child but out of his hands.
Speak softly yourself so that the recording level can be kept high.
Ideally, in a phonological study one would keep an ongoing
analysis to make sure the data are sufficient at a particular point
in development. This is not possible in this study, so that instead
one should aim for maximum variety in the tape. Try to tape in situa-
tions where the child is most fluent, and when he talks about enough
different things to get a varied phonological sample. Ideally one
would also get some repetitions, separated enough so that some of the
range of free variation for particular morphemes could be sampled.
Transcribing is facilitated in several ways. Try to keep a
record, if you can, of the child's speech at the early stages in
writing. Some consonant sounds are hard to discriminate from tapes,
and such @ written notation could aid. Also, it will help you notice
when the child spoke inaudibly so that if the item is important you
can elicit it again. It would help greatly if the child's caretaker
made a running translation of the child's utterances immediately after
they occur. This is not too difficult at the early stages. You can
hear Jater on the tape which are expansions and which accurate
repetitions. Also the caretaker's version will reveal the overt norm
for the phonemes, as the child is given them as a model. Notes on
the ongoing activity are necessary, since one always underestimates
the dependence on situational environment of young children's speech.
If the child's caretaker is not available to help transcribe the
tapes, at least the comments on the tape will be a partial substitute.
We have found several mechanical aids to transcription that you
may use once back from the field, for ambiguous passages. One is
slowing down the tape to half speed. Another is creating a tape
loop for ambiguous passages. Systematic testing of alternative inter-
pretations is always necessary, since there is a strong tendency to
assimilate what is heard to the norms of the hearer.
(Additional advice on transcription is given in Appendix 8.3
15
1.3. LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT: VOCABULARY
A large-scale study of vocabulary development is beyond the scope
of the field project envisioned here. Limited study of vocabulary,
however, can contribute to several questions of psycholinguistic
theory. In the phonology section, above, reference has been made to
vocabulary study in the process of revealing a child's phonemi
system and his substitution rules. |
1.3 ebe Initial Vocabulary
A cross-cultural comparison of the initial vocabularies of chil-
dren may be revealing in regard to questions of language functions
and contexts of language acquisition. Accordingly, we have designated
children C and D as subjects for the study of initial vocabulary.
These showld be children early in the one-word stage, having a small
vocabulary (4-40 words, as estimated by mother) at the beginning of
the study. C is a boy and D a girl, and each should be visited at
least twice, as indicated in Table 3. The researcher's task will be
to attempt to elicit as much of the child's vocabulary as possible.
(See suggestions in Section 1.2.4, above.) Initially, some time will
have to be spent with the child and its mother--listening carefully,
asking the mother what the child is saying and what words it knows,
and so on. This task is scheduled for the sixth research month, as
it will pose the researcher with especially difficult problems of
speech perception and elicitation.
We can only provide general research advice in regard to elicit-
ing initial vocabularies. The task would be greatly facilitated if
the researcher could find a child able to respond to requests for
names (e.g. @ child who will name an object pointed to by an adult,
respond to a question such as "What's this?", and so on). It may be
easy to train some children to perform in such fashion. The child
should then explore his familiar world with the researcher, with en-
couragement to name objects. The aim of this exploration will be to
reveal (1) the extent and range of vocabulary, (2) the semantic do-
mains named by the child, (3) the "innominate" zones, (4) the nature
of generalizations of meaning, and (5) the extent of homonymity.
At the same time, the researcher should be alert to the means in
which adults name objects for children (cf. Brown, 1958; and 3.4.3.3).
If the mother is cooperative, it would be informative to present her
with objects and ask her to name them for the child. Note if this is
something which is habitually done, the sort of name offered by the
mother (e.g. diminutive, class name, proper name, etc.), the mother's
concern for securing the attention of the child and ensuring the re-
tention of the word, and so on. Note also if requests for names are
made by the child, and, if so, how they are responded to by adults.
Section 1.3 was written by Dan I. Slobin and Susan M. Ervin-Tripp.
a athe on
16
The following methodological suggestions pertain to the study of
first words both from the point of view of semantics and phonology:
1) Try to get to know the child so he is not silently inspecting
you. Bracelets, keys, clock are good things to interest a child. On
the other hand, toys which involve 2 lot of walking around or make too
much noise themselves may interfere with the recording.
you may be able to jdentify some vocabulary they have not noticed,
just by noting regularities of occurrence. Whenever you hear 4 repeti-
tion of sound correlated with circumstance, make 4 phonetic transcrip-
tion of what you hear. Also note exactly what the child was looking
at, pointing to, or handling. You may be able to get the word also by
repeating it and getting an imitation, but make & separate notation
when you have done this.
3) Test the semantic range of the child's naming. What else
will elicit the same word? Some children will react to questions ,
such as "What's this?" if done in the right way. Try having an older
sibling or the mother do this, or see if they have advice about how to
get the child to respond. How you test for semantic range will depend
on your own ingenuity. Pictures, "play-doh" and other objects all may
work.
4) Set up a range of pictures and/or objects and see what the
child will comprehend when you say, there's the X?" or, “Bring me the
x." Ask the mother what the child is likely to respond to when ad-
dressed in this way. Comprehension may be ahead of naming. Note that
you can test your hunches about the phonemic system now by varying the
word and seeing if it is still understood.
5) In analyzing the phonemic system, note the canonical form of
words. What are the free variants in each position? Do certain
vowels occur with certain consonants only? What features are constant?
6) To determine substitution rules, get the child to imitate you
and see if you are able to predict his substitutions systematically,
including the canonical form for words. For example, are polysyllabic
words always imitated as CVCV; monosyllabic as cvc? If you repeat the
imitation, does the child alter the word he says? If so, how? This
gives a clue as to the unstable features of his system.
1.3.2. Vocabulary Related to Grammatical Categories
When working with older children (E-N), the researcher should
attend to the acquisition of those lexical categories which have
tical significance in the language. It has been found, for
example, that lexical items referring to certain semantic categories
appear in child speech at the same time as those categories become
morphologically marked. A good example of this phenomenon is the
finding of Gvozdev (1949) that, ina Russian-speaking child, the
first use of the word mnogo [much, many} appeared at the same time
17
as the singular-plural distinction in noun markings, and that the
words se [right away} and skoro [soon] entered at the same
‘time as the future tense. The researcher would do well, therefore,
to watch for the appearance of words referring to such categories as
time, number, conditionality, causality, and the like, if the lan-
guage also marks such categories by gramm”. al] means.
q q »
antago
1.4. LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT: GRAMMAR
1.4.1. Collection of Basic Corpora
The most extensive recorded speech corpora to be collected in
the study are those produced by children E and F. Great care should
be exercised in selecting these children, as they will provide the
basic data for as full a description of grammatical development in
the given language as possible. The research aim is to make these
data roughly comparable to those gathered by Roger Brown, Ursula
Bellugi, and Colin Fraser in the United States (Bellugi, 1964, 1965,
1967; Brown & Bellugi, 1964; Klima & Bellugi, 1966), and by David
McNeil in Japan (McNeill, 1966a; McNeill & McNeill, 1966). ‘The rich
grammatical analyses resulting from those studies are based on record-
ing of spontaneous speech, in home settings, chiefly between mother
end child. As far as possible, we wish to replicate that situation
in our field studies.
Children E and F are to be picked to correspond to the first and
fourth stages in the study of Brown et al. Brown's longitudinal study
covered several years in the life of each child; since our fieldworkers
will probably be in the field for only one year, the best we can do is
to select children at different stages of development, and hope to put
together some sort of continuous picture--however hazardous--by juxta-
posing the records of several children. Because of the very large
amount of time required to transcribe spontaneous speech data, we
recommend that the sample be limited to two children. Brown's defini-
tion of stages is based on mean utterance length and upper bound
(longest utterance )--in morphemes. His sample includes three chil-
dren, for whom the first and fourth stages--the stages we wish to
pick for children E and F, respectively--are defined as follows:
Number of Morphemes
Mean Utterance Upper Bound
Length
First Stage 1.75 5.0
Fourth Stage 3.50 11.0
Brown's sample at each stage consists of about 700 utter-
ances, on the basis of which he is able to write systematic and
thorough grammars for each of three children at five stages of de-
‘velopment. According to Ursula Bellugi (pers. comm., 1966):
The grammars include information on the appearance of
grammatical markers and constructions like the following:
lexical items, count nouns, mass nouns, proper nouns,
Section 1.4 was written by Dan I. Slobin.
19
personal pronouns, ‘>cersonal pronouns, articles, adjectives,
quantifiers, process and status verbs, separable verbs, loca-
tive and limiting adverbs, prepositions, negative words, in-
terrogative words, imperative words, rejoinders, inter jections,
nounphrases, noun markers, plural and possessive, case marking
in pronouns, number agreement, transitivity, prepositional
phrases, verb modifications, progressive, past, indicative,
complements, interrogative constructions, auxiliary elements,
phase structure rules and transformations, etc.
It is our aim to collect samples of at least 700 utterances from
| children E and F, following the schedule presented in Table 3. (These
data will be intensively analyzed return from the field, but
should be transcribed in the field.) To be maximally comparable to
| Brown's children, these children should (1) have a high rate of
speech, (2) be largely intelligible, and (3) have a high rate of verbal
interchange with mother or mother substitute. Brown and his co-
; workers found it necessary to visit a large number of homes in order
| to select three children fitting these criteria. Although we cannot,
with a sample of two, either control for or study sex differences, it
is at least advisable that children E and F be of the same sex, as we
: wish to treat their records as at least vaguely continuous. (It is
: therefore desirable, of course, that they and their home settings be
similar in other respects as well).
In addition to seeking children who meet Brown's three main cri-
teria, the investigator must also find children roughly corresponding
- to Brown's stages of linguistic development. Mean utterance length
and upper bound (in morphemes ) should be determined for eligible
, children on the basis of a sample of 100 utterances (either noted by
hand or tape-recorded, as circumstances allow). The following are
| Brown's rules (pers. comm.) for calculating mean utterance length.
They will, of course, have to be modified on the basis of the lan-
guage under investigation.
| 1. Omit unclear and partial utterances.
-> | 2. Include all exact utterance repetitions. Stuttering is
: marked as repeated efforts at a single word; count the
- word once in the most complete form produced. In the
few cases where a word is produced for emphasis or the
[ like (e.g., no, no, no) count each occurrence.
3. Do not count such fillers as mm or oh, but do count no,
| yeah, and hi.
h, All compound words (two or more free morphemes ), proper
- names, and ritualized reduplications count as single words.
Examples: tel , Rackety-boom, choo-choo, quack-quack,
a nigtan’ a pocketbook, see-saw. Justification is that no
evidence that the constituent morphemes function as such for
these children.
| Semen
20
5. Count as one morpheme all irregular pasts of the verb.
Examples: got, did, went, saw, etc. Justification is
that no evidence that the child relates these to present
forms.
6. Count as one morpheme all diminutives (doggie, moumie,etc. )
because these children at least do not seem to use the
suffix productively. Diminutives are the standard forms
used by the child.
7. Count as separate morphemes all auxiliaries. For example:
is, have, will, can, must, would. Also all catenatives:
gonna., hafta, wanna. These latter counted as single mor-
phemes rather than as going to or want to because evidence
is that they function so for the children. Count as sep-
arate morphemes all inflections. For example: possessive
{s}, plural {s}, 3rd person singular {s}, regular past {D},
progressive {in}. ?
The investigator cannot, of course, hit the definitions of Stage 1
and Stege 4 exactly on the mark. Brown himself has the following
spread in his data, where the figures are based on about 700 utterances
per child.
Stage Child Mean Utterance Upper Bound
Length
1 Adam 2.06 4.0
1 Eve 1.68 4.25
1 Sarah 1.73 4.0
4 Adam 3255 12.0
h Eve 3.70 12.0
h Sarah 3.62 10.0
Note that no mention has been made here of chronological age.
The goal of the investigator should be to find articulate and coopera~
tive children at these stages of development, regardless of age.
(Child E, of course, will be younger than F.) E should be found by
the third month in the field; F by the fourth. E, the younger, should
be visited more frequently than F, as the rate of development will
probably be more rapid at earlier stages. As shown in Table 3, E is
to be visited six times, at intervals of about a month-and-a-halt ;
while F is to be visited three times, at intervals of three months
each. For each visit, recordings should be made on two consecutive
days. Recordings should be mace at the same time of day, for each
child, throughout the series. The aim should be to collect at least
700 utterances at each two-day visit. We recommend two consecutive
sessions of 1.5 hours for each visit to E, and two consecutive ses-
sions of 2 hours for each visit to F.
These visits should consist of free interaction between the child
and mother (or mother-substitute), with minimal intervention by the
21
investigator and his assistant. The assistant should make on-the-spot
notes about utterances which may be difficult to transcribe later,
while the investigator should make sufficient notation of actions and
situations to make it possible to retrieve the settings and meanings
of utterances when making the transcription. The tapes should be
transcribed as soon as possible, with the aid of the native assistant,
and, if necessary, of the mother. (Appendix 2 contains advice on
transcription problems and format.) It would be wise for the investi-
gator and his assistant to get to know the child first, and perhaps
to ask the mother to interpret the child's speech before each taping
session t©gins. Time of day and activities should be selected with
ease of recording in mind--e.g., circumscribed movement, alertness
of child and mother, possibility of normal interaction, etc.
The investigator should also administer to children E and F, at
each visit, the standard imitation, comprehension, and eliciting pro-
cedures described in Sections 1.4.2, 1.4.3, and 1.4.4 below. Work
with children E and F should also be approached in the light of
theoretical and practical issues raised in 3.2 and in Appendix l.
Frequent reference should be made to Table 2, in order to ensure that
all necessary data are gathered on these two central children (motor
development, interaction networks, parental speech and attitudes, etc.).
It may also be useful to occasionally give the mother definite tasks
to communicate to the child in order to elicit speech from her (e.g.
teach words, give order:, teach a game, play a game, read a story, etc.).
22
1.4.2. Elicited Sentence Imitation
The standardized procedures described in this section, and the
next two sections (1.4.3 and 1.4.4), will be administered to children
G-N at two-month intervals, as shown in Table 3, and also to children
E and F. At the beginning of testing, children G-N, as shown in
Table 2, range in age from 230 to 432, with one boy and one girl
picked at age intervals of eight months. That is, testing will begin
with two children each of ages 230, 238, 334, and 4;2. The children
should be articulate and cooperative. The imitation, comprehension,
and eliciting procedures can probably all be administered in a single
session. The major task in regard to imitation will be to construct
and administer a standard set of about 50 sentences which the children
will be asked to imitate at each session, as described below.
Construction of Model Sentences
The model sentences should be carefully designed to reflect the
range of sentence types typical to child speech. They should vary in
regard to grammatical form, intonation and stress patterns, and length
(ranging from two to about eight morphemes). The major sentence types
and syntactic processes of the language should be included: affirma-
tive, negative, imperative, yes/no question, "wh" questions, negative
questions, sentence conjunctions, embeddings, etc. The sentences should
also sample major grammatical categories, such as tense, mood, aspect,
etc.
Some sentences should successively increase in length, in order
to determine the nature of omissions in imitation (e.g. He sees the
ball; He can see the ball; He sees the red ball; He can see the
red ball; He can see the big red ball ...). It is especially valu-
able to ask the child to imitate sentences which seem to exceed his
productive capacity, allowing for revealing alterations imposed on the
model sentence by the child's own system of grammatical rules. For
example, Bellugi found the following informative imitation in a child
whose speech was in a stage of multiple negation (pers. comm.)
Adult: "Adam, say what I say: ‘The boy can't have any supper
and the girl can't either.'”
Adam: "The boy can't have no supper and the girl can't have
none neither."
The model sentences should also allow the child to impose normal-
izations in his repetitions. For example, Slobin and Welsh (1967)
found that a two-year-old girl tended to ignore repeated words in
model sentences, as in:
Adult: "Mark fell fell off the horse."
Child: "Mark fell offa horse.”
23
Adult: “I can can can eat."
Child: "I can eat."
Similarly, contracted forms, at a given stage, may be repeated as un-
contracted (e.g. he'll as he will), or uncontracted as contracted
(e.g. will not as won't). Such findings should be tested cross-
linguistically.
Another phenomenon worthy of cross-linguistic validation is the
finding of Slobin and Welsh that conjoined sentences are frequently
inverted in inmediate imitation. For example:
Adult: "Mommy ate the candy and Mommy ate the ice cream."
Child: "Mommy eat the ice cream and Mommy eat a candy."
In constructing the model sentences, the researcher should be
careful to avoid phonological ambiguity (e.g. given a model sentence,
"That truck is big,” it would be difficult to tell if the child imi-
tated the first word as that or the).
In designing model sentences, and evaluating the results of the
imitation tests, the findings of previous investigators should be
borne in mind. Attempts should be made to produce data relevant to
the findings and speculations of American psycholinguists, as exem-
plified in the passages quoted below:
With increasing age, children produce more imitations
that are morphemically identical with the original. With
increasing age, the imitative utterances produced include
larger number of morphemes--approaching the numbers in the
model sentences. The morphemes produced are invariably in
r) their original order. Omissions do not appear to be random
| or idiosyncratic. On the contrary, it looks as if, across
children and across sentences, there is a consistent ten-
dency to retain one kind of morpheme and drop another kind.
The two sorts of morphemes contrast on several correlated
dimensions. The morphemes most likely to be retained are:
morphemes that occur in final position in the sentence;
[' morphemes that are reference-making forms; morphemes that
belong mainly to the large and expandable noun, verb, and
adjective parts-of-speech; morphemes that are relatively
unpredictable from the context; and morphemes that receive
the heavier stresses in ordinary English pronunciation.
The morphemes least likely to be retained are: morphemes
that occur in intermediate positions in the sentence;
morphemes that are not reference-making forms; morphemes
that belong to such small-sized grammatical categories as
the articles, modal auxiliaries, and inflections; morphemes
that are relatively predictable from context and so carry
little information; and morphemes that receive the weaker
stresses in ordinary English pronunciation (Brown & Fraser,
1964, pp. 75-6).
ter ga
en
x & *
2h
This very preliminary analysis [of 1000 elicited imitations
from one child} has convinced us that sentence recognition
and imitation are filtered through the individual's productive
linguistic system. More specifically, we believe that we can
tentatively offer the following generalizations:
Echo [the child's pseudonym] can spontaneously utter
sentences which she cannot imitate. On the other hand, she
can give recoded imitations of model sentences which exceed
her productive capacities.
Emphasis can lead her to repeat words she would normally
omit from imitation, but she generally ignores repeated words
in imitating model sentences.
If she comprehends a sentence, she need not repeat it in
the order given. Reordering can also take place as a result
of imposing SVO [subject-verb-object] constructions upon model
sentences.
The process of sentence recognition includes retrieval
of both form and content. Syntactic structures take up
space in memory, and frequently content will. be sacrificed
to the retention of form in immediate, rote imitation. On
the other hand, if content has been retrieved and stored, it
may be encoded in the child's own syntax in repetition.
A fine-grained analysis of repeated imitations of system-
atically varied model sentences can reveal aspects of the
child's theory of syntax, including transformational rules and
the syntactic and semantic markers borne by lexical items
(Slobin & Welsh, 1967, p. 17).
* %* &
It is clear that A and B structures were different for our
subjects: the A structures were relatively easy for them to
repeat, the B structures were quite difficult. .. . We dif-
ferentiate between A and B surface structures in terms of a
property I will call compression. Compression refers to the
way semantic information occurs in a sentence. When sentences
have low compression, semantic information is distributed
fairly evenly throughout the sentence; when sentences have
high compression, semantic information is bunched together,
or compressed, at the nounphrase or verbphrase level. in
terms of tree structure, highly compressed sentences have
NP or VP nodes dominating several information-carrying
elements. In sentences with low compression, NP or VP nodes
dominate relatively few informetion-carrying elements.
The A structures, which the children found easy to re-
peat, have relatively low compression; B structures, which
were more difficult, have relatively high compression (Smith,
25
1966, pp. 11, 13-14). [Smith's model sentences can be found
in Appendix 1.1.5.]
%* % *
One may state that within the bounds of a two- to nine-
wore, sentence, the length of the sentence is not critical in
determining the success of repetition even for children as
young as 3 years. The differences in the ability of children
to repeat the various sentences seems to be dependent on the
particular rules used to generate these sentences rather than
sentence length. . . . The most frequent types of deviation
from complete repetition found were modification of trans-
formations and correction of restricted forms [i.e. forms
restricted to child grammar]. The modifications always took
the form of using a set of rules which come earlier in the
grammar than those used in the sentence. .. . When given the
memory eid of immediate recall of . . . sentences, @ significant
number of the children reproduced transformations which they do
not use in their own sentences (Menyuk, 1963b, pp. 436-7).
[Menyuk's model sentences can be found in Appendices 1.1.2 and
1.1.4.)
* * *
Before attempting to design model sentences in the field lan-
guage, the investigator should carefully examine Appendix 1.1, which
contains lists of model sentences from a number of American studies
of elicited sentence imitation.
Administration and Pranscription of Imitation Test
The sentences should be presented by a native speaker, in normal
Bi. speaking intonation, and both the model sentence and the child's imi-
tation should be recorded. It should be fairly simple to train chil-
r dren to imitate. For American children, the instruction, "Say what I
say," is generally sufficient, although brief preliminary training is
necessary. Menyuk used the following instructions:
The E [Experimenter) said, "I'm going to say some
= sentences for you. I want you to say just what I say. If
I say ‘The sun is shining’ I want you to say A
| If the correct response was obtained the E proceeded. If
i: not, the E stated, "No, you say just what I say. If I say
'The sun is shining’ you say -" No more
than these two examples of what was required was needed by
any of the Ss [children aged 2310 - 631] (1963b, p. 431).
If a child fails to repeat a sentence, he should be given a sec-
ond chance, with a second presentation of the model sentence. If he
te seems to fail to respond because of distraction, the examiner should
return to the sentence later in the series. Special note should be
4 made of sentences a child is reluctant to imitate, or refuses to
ee imitate.
:
eee ee ee
—_ "Tr _—
26
Before beginning each recorded session, the investigator should
verbally note on the tape the name of the child, the date, the time of
day, and the experimental setting (location, other people present,
etc.). This information should also appear on the transcribed data
sheets. The tapes should be transcribed soon after the session, with
the help of the native examiner. The transcriptions need contain only
the children's utterances, as the model sentences will be standardized.
The model sentences should be numbered, and the transcriptions should
indicate the number of the model sentence corresponding to the child's
utterance.
In analyzing the data of the imitation test one should note:
(1) omissions and changes introduced by children of different ages,
(2) number of children of a given age imitating a given sentence
correctly, (3) changes with age in a given child's imitation of the
same sentence, (4) degree of preservation of pitch, stress, and order
of elements.
The data should be examined before the next session with a given
child, to allow the experimenter to follow up any suggestive leads
with the administration of additional model sentences for repetition
between standard sessions.
27
1.4.3. Speech Comprehension
When working with children E-N, the investigator will want to dis-
cover the range of linguistic structures which they can comprehend, as
well as imitate or produce. Ideally, all three aspects of linguistic
performance--imitation, production, and comprehension--should be ex-
amined for each linguistic structure studied. Developmental psycho-
linguistics, however, has had little success in devising adequate
measures of the comprehension of linguistic structures, except for
those grammatical distinctions most readily picturable (singular-
plural, subject-object of action, etc.).
An important, unsystematic cue to a child's linguistic compre-
hension comes from an examination of his answers to questions. This
means of discovering comprehension will be most valuable for children
E and F, for whom the investigator will have many hours of recorded
mother-child dialog. Comprehension can also be tested in experimental
children G-N through carefully constructed questions, especially if
applied to stories which have just been told, to pictures, or to other
recent or ongoing events.
More systematic techniques can be developed with the use of
standardized pictures. One technique, developed by Fraser, Bellugi,
and Brown (1963), involves pairs of pictures illustrating a minimal
grammeticel contrast, such as singular-plural, and the instruction
to point to the picture corresponding to a given utterance (e.g.
“The kitten plays" vs. "The kittens play,” presented in conjunction
with appropriate pictures). ‘The pictures used by Fraser et al. are
described in Appendix 1.2.1.
Our pilot studies have raised certain problems, however, in re-
gard to the use of pairs of pictures. It is often difficult to get
children to point clearly to one of the pictures, and, even if the
child does point, it is difficult to determine if he is guessing.
Osser (pers.comm.) has developed a modification of this format, using
three pictures: "To test for comprehension of a specific structure
the child is presented with a set of three pictures, two of them cor-
responding to the pair of test sentences, the third picture being a
‘neutral’ picture with the same visual elements as the other two
pictures, but with a different arrangement." For example, to test
for comprehension of subject-object relations in the passive, Osser
uses the following pictures:
@ girl pulling a boy in a wagon
@ boy pulling a girl in 4 wagon
a boy and a girl pulling an empty wagon
The child is then presented with either the sentence, "The boy is
pulled by the girl,” or, "The girl is pulled by the boy, " and must
indicate the appropriate one of the three pictures.
28
This technique, as the picture-pair technique, requires that all
of the pictures in a given presentation contain the same elements
(e.g. boy, girl, wagon). The experimenter should first offer the
child both sentences, and then ask for the picture ccrresponding to one
of them. For example, “Here are some pictures. One of them is called,
‘The boy is pulled by the girl'; the other [or another] one is called,
‘The girl is pulled by the boy.’ Now show me: 'The girl is pulled by
the boy.*"
In order to avoid the ambiguity of an uncertain pointing response
in a young child, it might be best to mount each picture separately,
and ask the child to hand the correct picture to the experimenter.
(The pictures, of course, should be sturdily mounted and covered with
cellophane or the like to protect them from sticky fingers and other
hazards.) Fraser et al. offer the following useful methodological ad-
vice for research of this kind:
The pictures belonging to a contrasting pair were mounted
side by side in such a way that there was no consistent
relationship on any problem between the order in which a
verbal contrast was given and the positions (left or right)
of the pictures.
We wanted to be certain that censistently correct re-
sponses should be possible only for Ss [subjects] having
control of the grammatical contrasts presented. A S ought
not to be able to infer correct responses from the positions
of the pictures, the order of the problems, the order in
which he was asked to respond to the parts of the contrast,
or from any interrelationship among these variables. .. -
To make sure of these things we used counterbalanced and
randomized orders. . « e«
Before performing any of the three tasks, the S was
shown a colored picture-book and encouraged to talk about
the pictures. This helped the child to overcome any re-~-
luctance to talk and provided a small sample of the child's
spontaneous speech.
. . « After performing both halves of an item, S, whether
or not he had answered correctly, was encouraged by E
[experimer.ter] with some such remark as "That's the way."
Nonverbal rewards were not used (1963, pp. 128-9).
The pictures, of course, will have to be designed to illustrate
relevant grammatical devices of the language in question. In Russian,
for example, a single pair or triad of pictures depicting subject-
verb-object relations would not be sufficient; rather, 2 number of
such picture sets would have to be drawn in order to present animate
and inanimate objects in the masculine gender, and also objects in
the feminine and neuter genders, because the object in Russian
sentences receives a variety of inflectional markers as 2 function
of animation and gender.
29
The experiment of Fraser et al. demonstrates that, in spite of the
problems involved with the technique of pointing to one of a pair of
pictures, such a comprehension test can yield unexpectedly rich data.
For example, they found that American three-year-olds treated passive
sentences on the basis of standard English word order, treating the
first noun as subject and the last as object, thus revealing an im-
portant aspect of the English-speaking child's processing of sentences.
They conclude:
In active-voice sentences, subject and object appear in
that order, whereas in passive-voice sentences the order is
object and subject. Suppose the 3-year-old processes each
passive-voice sentence as though it were in the active voice.
"The girl is pushed by the boy” is not computed as: Object--
Verb an the passive--Subject, but rather as: Subject--Verb in
the active with odd appurtenances--Object. The odd appurtenances
are is, -ed, and by which S$ may take to be signs of some uncommon
tense like "will have pushed." Processing the sentence in this
way would enable S to maintain the generality of the usual rule
of English word order in which the subject precedes the object.
With the Subject/Object contrast in the passive voice we
turned up a revealing pattern of evidence by accident. If an
investigator wanted to use the .. . procedures to test hypotheses
about particular aspects of grammatical operation, he could
easily design problems that would be revealing by intention
(1963, p. 133).
A variety of instructions to manipulate objects can also be re-
vealing of a child's capacities to comprehend speech. In construct-
ing such situations, however, the investigator must be careful to
ensure that the only cue to correct performance is linguistic.
Parental reports of children's comprehension are almost invariably
based on understanding of entire utterances in situations with a good
deal of non-linguistic support. For example, if a child performs
correctly when told to “put the glass on the table” and "put the milk
in the glass," there is no evidence of his comprehension of the dif-
ference between the prepositions on and in. He may have responded in
like fashion to the two sentences with the prepositions switched, or
omitted. A controlled situation such as the following, however, can
serve to test comprehension of the two prepositions alone: Present
the child with two cups, one inverted and one open, and instruct him
to put an object "in" or "on" the cup. Or present the same instruc-
tions with only one cup present, inverted or right-side-up. The im-
portant control in situations such as these is that there is no cue
to the child other than the preposition. (Additional examples of
object-manipulation teciniques for testing comprehension can be found
in Appendix 1.2.2.)
The problem facing all such techniques, however, is that only a
limited number of grammatical distinctions can be realized in the form
30
of pictures or object manipulations. Comprehension of subtle matters
such as combinations of tense, mood, and aspect, or embedding, and s0
forth, will have to be examined by the construction of ingenious story
comprehension and question-and-answer techniques which probably go
beyond the scope of the present project.
Appendix 1.2 should be carefully studied to provide ideas for
the construction of feasible comprehension tests in the field.
31
1.4.4. Elicitation of Speech
In addition to recording spontaneous speech, the investigator
will want to attempt to elicit particular types of constructions.
Appendix 1.3 contains many examples of eliciting procedures which have
been used with English-speaking children; additional advice on elicita-
tion can be found in Section 3.4.3.5. Eliciting procedures can help to
increase the richness of data yielded by recorded sessions with chil-
dren E-N. The American literature contains a number of useful sug-
gestions for eliciting specific grammatical constructions from little
children. The following quotations from research studies should be of
value to the investigator:
- « » attempts to elicit negatives were made by putting
clothes on the wrong doll or puzzle pieces in the wrong
place. Doll clothing was used for eliciting possessives.
To elicit an interrogative sentence, two dolls were “fed, "
and the child was told to “ask Joe what he wants to eat.
Plurals were produced for nonsense objects made of play-doh
[or wood]. If one of the dolls was left behind, "because
he is sick," the child was asked to talk on the toy telephone
to find out how "Joe" was, another device for eliciting
questions. Telephone conversations with the child tested his
reliance on verbal rather than gestural cues... .
On the pronoun test, the child was questioned about
pictures, the questions being designed to elicit sentences
containing possessives and nominative pronouns varying in
number and gender. In the test of discourse agreement,
questions tested the class of responses, verb restrictions,
comprehension of subject-object distinctions ("Who is he
feeding?" vs. "Who is feeding him?") and "why" questions.
There were two matched forms alternated each month, using the
same pictures (Miller & Ervin, 1964, pp. 12-13).
* + &
To test for yes-no inversion, the child would be instructed
to “ask the doll if he wants some food"; or for the morpho-
phonemic putterns of irregular verbs we would say "Ask the
doll what ne saw yesterday" and the child's response would
be either "What did you saw yesterday?” or "What did you see
yesterday?". Having the child imitate sentences or phrases
provides another check, since it has been found that children
seldom imitate grammatical patterns that are not a part of
their own language system. Still another technique is to
present the child with a choice such as: "Is it a new red
dress, or a red new dress?" The child almost always picks
the last of two alternatives if he lacks the appropriate
grammatical rules (Miller, 1964, p. 7).
* *
We hoped to get as much speech as possible in as little
time as possible and to have examples of the full variety of
sentence types the child could produce. There were those who
warned that the child would be shy and speechless in our
presence; this was not the case. Mothers told their children
that visitors were comiag and, in general, we were eagerly
welcomed, shown a parade of toys and games, and talked to
rather steadily. It became clear that the child expected a
guest to put in some time as a playmate, and so the recording .
was @ two-man job with one of us taking data and the other
prepared to play cowboy, horsie, blocks, coloring, trains, and
the mule in "Kick the mile." [If this is a cross-cultural
= the investigator will have more than his hancs
fullij} ...
Much of the time the child was occupied with his normal
routine of play, talking with his mother, washing, and eating.
So long as these activities involved a reasonable amount of
speech, we took no active part beyond delivering signals of
attention and approval. When the operant level was very low,
we sometimes tried to raise it. In the first days we did the
sort of verbal prompting that is anyone's first notion of a
technique for eliciting speech from children. You ask what
something is called and this brings out vocabulary items --which
are not useful for a study of grammar. Or you ask a "yes-no"
question such as: "Is that your horsie?" to which the answer
is either "yes" or "no." We eventually learned that it is
easier to "inspire" speech by doing something interesting than
to elicit it with questions. If the adult "playmate" starts
a game that is simple, repetitious, and destructive, the child
will usually join him and start talking. A universal favorite
is to build (painstakingly) an unsteady tower of blocks and
register chagrin when the child sends it crashing dow. A
simple game involving implicit rules--such as the green blocks
belong to me and the red ones to you--creates a situation in
which negative sentences can be elicited. If the adult play-
mate breaks the established rule and moves one of the chi1d's
blocks, he is usually told that he is not to do that (Brown &
Fraser, 1964, pp. 51-2).
In addition to these general suggestions, Appendix i.3 con-
tains explicit tests, designed by Ursula Bellugi, for the elicitation
of negation (App. 1.3.1), interrogation (App. 1.3.2), reflexivization
(App. 1.3.3), tag questions (App. 1.3.4), and transformations (App.
1.3.5). Many of these techniques have clear cross-linguistic applica-
bility.
Another valuable eliciting technique is to introduce new
words and see how they are dealt with by the child. The introduction
of artificial woris into a child's vocabulary, of course, is but a
special case of what happens every day. When new words are used in 4
form other than that in which they were introduced, the child's lin-
guistic competence is often clearly revealed. For example, when a
33
child spontaneously says “two mouses" or "I breaked the glass" it is
clear that his speech is based on an underlying system of rules, that
he has unconsciously made inductive generalizations which go beyond
the specific utterances he has heard. Overregularizations and analogic
forms have long been noted in child speech. When carefully studied
they can reveal much of the child's developing grasp of the morpho-
logical devices of his language.
It is difficult, however, for the investigator to sit back and
wait for the child to make such errors in speaking. Jean Berko (1958)
has made it possible to gather such data quickly and easily in in-
genious test in which little children are presented with nonsense
words and asked to supply plural forms, change verb tense, and so on.
A similar technique has been developed in the USSR by Bogoyavlenskiy
(1957). Kernan and Blount have adapted this technique for use with
Spanish-speaking children in Mexico (1966), and Ervin-Tripp and Miller
have elaborated the technique for use with very young children (Miller
& Ervin, 1964). All of the materials of these investigators are pre-
sented in Appendix 1.3.6, and the general technique could easily be
adapted to special problems of interest in a given field language.
Berko describes her technique as follows:
In order to test for the child's use of morphological
rules of different types and under varying phonological con-
ditions, a number of nousense words were made up, following
the rules for possible sound combinations in English. Pictures
to represent the nonsense words were then drawn on cards.
There were 27 picture cards, and the pictures, which were
highly colored, depicted objects, cartoon-like animals, and
men performing various actions. . . . several actual words
were also included. A text, muitting the desired form, was
typed on each card. An example of the card test for the
reguiar plural allomorph in /-z/ cun be seen [below].
» « - each child was .. . told that now he was going to
look at some pictures. The experimenter would point to the
picture and read the text. The child would supply the missing
word, and the item he employed was noted phonemically.
TiiTS IS A WU.
: ) p)
NOW THERE IS ANOTHER ONE.
THERE ARE WO OF THEM. |
| STHERE ARE TWO pee 2
34
As a warm-up, the experimenter should begin by presenting familiar
objects and using real words. This will acquaint the child with the
procedure, and will also provide necessary data on the child's use of
the morphological features in question when speaking normally. The
experience of Kernan and Blount in administering a Spanish form of the
Berko test in Mexico is informative:
In contrast to Berko, we experienced considerable dif-
ficulty in eliciting answers from subjects. For this reason,
it was decided to precede each series of questions which
tested for a particular grammatical category with an example
question which used a real noun or verb. For example, before
he was tested on the formation of plurals, each child was
shown a picture of first one cat, and then two, and was told,
"Este es un gato. Ahora hay otro. Hay dos de ellos. Hay
dos “(mis is a cat. Now there is another one. There
are two of them. There are two .-) This is a departure
from Berko's procedure which was necessitated by the children's
difficulty in understanding the task at hand. This may in part
be explained by a difference in familiarity to testing situations
of this kind. American middle-class children have probably been
exposed to formal testing situations far more frequently than
have Mexican children of the lower socio-economic class. We
feel, however, that the use of examples did not affect the re-
liability of the test (1966, p. 3).
Adults should also be tested, in order to determine the end state
towards which the children are progressing. If possible, a wider range
of children should also be tested--perhaps all of the children in the
sample (A-X). Kernan and Blount tested children between the ages of
five and twelve, and found continuing morphological development beyond
the age range of four to seven tested by Berko in the United States.
"Nonsense objects’ can be used as well as pictures in such testing.
Miller and Ervin-Tripp constructed a collection of pairs of novel
wooden objects in longitudinal testing of extension of English plural
morphemes. An important aspect of their testing was the repeated ad-
ministration of the same items, a feature also included in our general
research design.
The texts were at first coliected weekly . . . because
of rapid change. [Collection began at about age two.) As
the rate of change decreased and the fluency of the children
increased, the frequency of text collection was gradually
reduced, until texts were collected at two-month intervals,
in two or three sets of closely spaced interviews totalling
four or five hours. . . «
The plural test consisted of 17 items. In each case a
toy object or picture was shown, its name elicited, and then
two were shown. "Here are two what?" ‘Thus the test did not
35
| give the children the option of using a syntactical plural
signal rather than a morphological one. The items included
certain pairs in which nonsense items (wooden constructions )
were given names which had the same final consonant as a
familiar word (boy-kigh, block-bik, bed-pud, horse-tass, orange-
bunge)- Irregulars were foot, man, and house. The singular
of the regular and nonsense words was offered by the investi-
gator if it was not offered by the child. In the case of foot
and man, however, the singular was not offered by the investi-
- gator. This procedure was followed in order to determine which
form, e.g-., foot or feet, was used by the child as the singular.
Testing was stopped on items after they had been contrasted for
several months (Miller & Ervin, 1964, p. 12).
Longitudinal testing of this sort in the field, using real words
and analogous nonsense words, would provide a cross-linguistic check
on Miller and Ervin-Tripp's finding that
nearly always the contrast with familiar forms preceded the
contrast with nonsense forms. . . . The average gap for boy vs.
kigh was 2.4 months; for ball vs. kigh was the same; for block
vs. bik the gap was 1.1 months; for cup vs. bik 1.5 months ... .
Thus the child who calls one cup by a different term than two
| cups might do the same with the nonsense toy bik in a month and
b. a half (Miller & Ervin, 196%, p. 33).
Procedures of this sort can easily be adapted for use in the field.
The selection of grammatical features to test will depend on the lan-
guage, aS will the construction of the nonsense words. If 2 native in-
, formant is available prior to departing for the field, some parts of the
/ ; test can be designed in advance. However, note that a test such as that
4 used by Berko (given in full in Appendix 1.3.6) cannot be translated
a wholesale into the field language. The distinctions chosen must be based
( on the particular language. For example, Berko tested for singular and
es plural. If the field lenguage, however, also has a dual, the two wugs
picture would not be sufficient: an additional, multi-wug picture would
aT be needed. Or if the language has genders which determine the form of
{| noun plurals, special nonsense pictures and words will be required, and
the introductory sentences will have to indicate the gender of the ob-
ject. (E.g., "Das ist ein Wug. Jetzt gibt es noch ein Wug. Es geben
zwei von ihnen. Es geben zwei os
Another set of eliciting procedures requires the child to repeat
fairly lengthy material offered by the experimenter. The length of
Li the material makes the task exceed inmediate imitation span, thus re-
vealing the child's productive system through the recoding which
takes place. One such procedure is to tell the child a short story,
perhaps accompanied by pictures, followed by the child's retelling of
P the story. A similar technique is to devise a simple game, unfamiliar
; to the child, and explain the game to him. He is then asked to explain
[) the game to som2one else. It would be of interest to vary the age of
36
the target person, comparing explanations offered by the subject to a
younger child, a friend of the same age, and an older child. (When
the mother is present, a useful variant of this technique is to ex-
plain the game to the mother and have her convey it to the child.
This may be an important tool for the elicitation of mothers’ speech. )
Another useful eliciting technique is to ask a child to tell you
a story. (Note if special narrative style is used--intonation, lexi-
con, formlae, etc.)
i
37
1.5. COMMUNICATIVE DEVELOPMENT |
1.5.1. The Child's Lifespace
A number of. sociolinguistic studies point to the decisive influence
cultural factors exert on language development. Verbal. ability as
measured in a number of ways has been found to correlate with socio-
econamic status and ethnic background (e.g. Bernstein, 196la,b, 1962,
1964; Anastasi & de Jesas, 1953). It is generally assumed that these
observed differences result from differences in the life experiences
of children from differcat sociocultural packgrounds. Little, however,
has been done to relate these findings to the actual cultural practices
which may engender these differences.
Any account of the child's acquisition of communicative competence
would be incomplete without some general investigation of the child's
lifespace. Such an account should include a description of the child's
physicel environmen’, and of the individuals who make up his network of
interaction. For each of the 24 children we would like to have a de-
scription of: the child's range of movement; the amount and type of
linguistic input he is exposed to; where and with whom he spends his
time; and the range of human artifacts, fauna, and flora with which he
comes in contact. The goal, then, is to establish typical daily routines
for children A-X.
This information should be gleaned both from observation and from
interview of the children and their parents. The investigator should
begin as soon as possible to keep a daily diary of all of the settings
in which he observes the children. The nature of the activity and the
age, sex, and status of the individuals participating should be speci-
fied. Interviews of the parents or caretakers of the children will
provide information about the children's cycles of activities when not
under direct observation. We hope in this way to be able to establish
a yearly cycle of activity for children of various ages and to deter-
mine the culturally defined categories of age-grading. For example,
are weeks differentiated in such @ way that a child characteristically
engages in different activities on some days as opposed to others?
What role, if any, do seasonal changes play in circumscribing the
activities of children? Into what time units is the annual cycle di-
vided, and what special events punctuate the cycle?
At some point during the field stay the investigator should de-
yote some major part of a day (5-6 hours) to following each of the
children and describing in detail the activities of the child for that
Section 1.5.1 was written by Claudia Mitchell and Dan I. Slobin.
38
day. ‘These data, along with the evidence gathered from interviews of
both the child and his parents, should give some idea of what a com-
posite day in the life of a child of a given age and culture is like.
If the society has formal education, part of the detailed observa-
tion showld include classroom behavior of the school-age children under
study. In so doing, the investigator should bear in mind the points
raised in Section 3.4.4 (Formal Education), especially questions bearing
on the role of speech, reading, and writing in school.
The following is a check-list of information which should be
gathered in regard to the lifespace of each of the children.
I. Characteristics of Child's Household
A. Physical Setting (provide map and pictures).
1. Is it made up of one building or several? (How many? )
2, Are there room divisions? (How many?)
3. What are the main functional areas of the dwelling
space?
h, Proximal relations of community
a. Is the household a nuclear or extended family
dwelling?
b. Is it isolated or part of a compact village?
c. Is the community rural or part of an urban center?
d. Are the members of the community interacting
individuals?
e. What is the 6ize of the commnity? (Obtain
census data if available.)
B. Human Component
1. Who are the individuals who make up the household?
(Specify age, sex, relationship, status, occupation. )
>. What is the child's relationship to each member of
the household?
3. Do all members of the household have equal access to
the entire dwelling area?
4h, Are any members of the household, either by design or
choice, generally or always confined to particular areas?
5. Are there ever individuals present in the household who
do not live there? If so:
a. Who are they?
b. How often do they visit?
c. How much time do they spend there?
a. What are their activities when they are present?
6. How much time does the child spend in the household?
7. Who else is present when the child is in the household?
8. How much time do other members of the household spend there?
ee See
39
II. Caretaking
A. Which members of the household have something to do with the
child? What? (Be specifice)
B. Who are the child's main caretakers? (Do older children be-
come parent substitutes for subsequent children?)
C. What is the child's range of movement? (Is locomotion re-
striction attempted? Specify.)
III. Linguistic Input
A. Who talks to whom?
B. What topics are talked about?
Cc. Are children ever instructed to be silent? On the basis of
topic? People present? Etc.
D. What settings are children freely admitted to?
E. Are children excluded from some settings?
F. Is language mastery ever a basis for the child's inclusion
or exclusion from setting or conversation?
G. Are any topics avoided in the presence of children?
H. What are the settings in which the child is a passive on-
looker? An active participant?
I. Who are the individuals with whom the child characteristically
interacts? (Be specific.)
1. What topics are discussed?
2. What is the duration of the interaction?
3. Is the child the main focus of attention?
J. Are metalinguistic comments ever directed to the child?
By whom?
x * *
Besides focusing on individual children, questions such as those
posed above can be turned around and applied to groups of children and
settings in which they are found. The investigator should consider the
following questions and suggestions in attempting to describe inter-
action networks of children of different ages:
1) Where do you find chi}“ren of each age? In what settings are
pre-school children found? No children? Etc.
2) How large are the groupings in each setting?
3) vo children spend their time in age-homogeneous groups?
(Does this depend on the age of the child?)
4) Who interacts with the children, and what are they doing
{| while children are present? What is the language input
1 | to children in these settings?
* 5) Study a specific setting for several days at the same time
| of day. Describe interactions in detail: who initiated
interaction and how? Who received the interaction? What
were the consequences? Notice if the same patterns are
repeated but do not appear elsewhere.
y
6) Ask informants to tell you who young children talk to, and
7)
check this information against direct observation.
Once you have determined the nature of a given interaction
network, try to get someone to violate the network--both as
a test of your analysis, and in order to discover how viola-
tions are responded to.
41
1.5.2. Dialog between Children
In this section and the next (Parentei Baby Talk), we wish to ob-
tain recorded samples of the speech styles used in addressing children
of different ages. Here we are concerned with situations in which the
interlocuter is an older child, whereas in the case of baby ‘alk it is
the child's mother. In this section we are also concerned with ob-
taining recorded samples of natural dialog between children of various
ages.
The most convenient time for the collection of these data is dur-
ing the all-day behavioral sample of each child described in the pre-
ceding section. On the day that a given child is followed about by
the investigator, opportunities for the recording of natural conver-
sation between children should be exploited. No doubt, many additional
opportunities will arise in the course of the field stay.
In addition to the recorded samples, which will be necessary for
an adequate analysis of speech style directed to children of various
ages, written notes on the form and content of interchild dialog will
be of value. What do children of different ages discuss, argue about,
play at? In taking these notes, the investigator should bear in mind
the many theoretical issues and research suggestions raised in Section
3.4.1, The Relation of Linguistic to Social Categories, and in Sec-
tion 3.5, Usage and Styles.
Section 1.5.2 was written by Dan I. Slobin.
1.5.3. Parental Baby Talk
Baby talk seems to be a feature of most, if not all, natural lan-
guages. Here the term refers to that special form of language that is
used primarily for talking to young children and is not the normal
adult usage of the language. Baby talk is a conventionalized aspect
of language which is learned and culturally transmitted as is the rest
of language. If baby talk is found in 4 child's own speech, it has
generally been acquired from an older member of the speech community,
and is seldom invented by the child himself.
As indicated in column XII of Table 2, we wish to collect recorded
samples of mother's speech to children A-F, Q, R, W, and X. The older
children are included as a control for the identification of special
features of maternal speech directed to very young children. (Although
only mothers are mentioned here, the heading of parental baby talk in-
dicates that it would be of value to record the speech of fathers to
children as well.) It would be best to have a standard setting, such as
asking the mother to give certein instructions to the child, describe an
event to him, tell him a story, and so on. If possible, some sections
of the tape should contain stretches of the mother 's speech alone, allow-
ing for later "blind" analysis of the tape, with no cue from the child's
voice as to the age of the child being addressed.
There are three broad areas to be investigated aid described ccn-
cerning the use of baby talk by any linguistic group: the linguistic
features of baby talk; the social context in which baby talk occurs;
and the belief system of the group concerning baby talk and its use.
Linguistic Features
Before any analysis cam be done of the linguistic forms, the
forms themselves must of course be elicited. Informants, when asked
for terms that differ from the usual adult terms and that are used
primarily witu children, may deny that any such baby terms exist. It
may therefore be necessary to seek the use of baby talk in ongoing lin-
guistic interaction. Furthermore, it will be necessary to be thoroughly
conversart with the normal adult language so that baby words may be
recognized as such. Once a few baby words have been discovered it
should be possible to elicit others in an interview with an adult by
presenting him with the terms you have recorded and contrasting them
with normal adult usage. This should provide a clear example to the
informant of the kind of data you are attempting to obtain. Another
way to elicit baby terms is to ask the adult informant how children
say certain words that are in the lexical domains in which other lan-
guages often have baby terms. This my elicit some baby words from
Section 1.5.3 was written by Keith Kernan.
4s
those adults who assume that the baby words in their language are
actually the way all babies say things.
Phono. . Baby words should be transcribed phonetically. A gloss
of the term s be given and the normal adult form should also be re~-
corded phonetically. The adult forms and baby-word forms should then be
contrasted to determine what type of differences exist between them.
The following phonological features are common to baby talk as con-
trasted to normal adult usage in a number of languages: simplifica-
tion of consonant clusters; replacement of velars (e.g. "o") by
apicals (e.g. "d"); replacement of an "y" by another consonant; some
kind of interchange among affricates, velars, ani stops; distant nasal
assimilation; loss of unstressed syllables; swall selection of vovels;
a morpheme canonical form of CVC or cvc(c)v.
Grammar. The grammar of baby talk may differ from that of adult
language in both form and function. On the one hand, baby talk may make
use of the same grammatical categories and convey the same type of in-
formation that the adult language does, but in a different manner; plural-
ity for example, may be expressed by means of reduplication whereas it is
expressed in the adult language by means of affixation. Baby talk, on
the other hand, may convey information absent in the adult language and
make use of grammatical categories that the adult language does not em-
ploy; for example, a diminutive form that is totally lacking in normal
usage may be present in the baby talk. More commonly, baby talk ignores
grammatical distinctions made in the adult language and fails to convey
grammatical information (such as tense) that is conveyed by adult Jan-
guage.
Gremmatical features common to baby talk in a number of languages
include: a diminutive form, reduplication, absence of inflectional
affixes, the presence of a special baby talk affix.
Lexicon. The words of baby talk seem to be concentrated more in
some domains than in others. This is in part the result of the small
child's lack of contact with parts of his cultural environment and in
part the result of the emphasis given by edults to the particular do-
mains of the culture they deem important and thererore present to the
infant early in his life. Care should be taken to determine whether the
baby words have the same range of reference as the adult words they
resembie.
Among the most conmon topics for which lexical items occur in the
baby talk of a number of languages are: kin names, nicknames, body
parts, body functions, basic qualities (e.g. good, bad, little), names
of animals, nursery games, toys, imperatives for common actions.
Intonational and Paralinguistic Features. Paralinguistic and in-
tonational features may mark baby talk as such. Because these features
might not be presented by an adult informant in an interview situation,
they should be recorded from ongoing linguistic behavior in which baby
talk is being used. Some common intonational features that accompany
the use of baby talk in a suzber of languages are: higher over-all
pitch, preference for certain contour patterns, and more or less volume.
Paralinguistic features might include facial expressions, physical
closeness to the baby, and the like.
Social] Context
Social context includes both the participants and the setting or
situation and each should be described fully for every particular speech
event involving baby talk.
The participants in the speech event include the sender, the re-
ceiver, and the audience. It is not enough simply to identify by name
the individuals who are filling each of these positions. Each partici-
pant in a speech situation has a particular role to play vis-2-vis the
other participants, and an attempt should be made to determine what
this role is for each speech situation in which baby talk is used.
For this, it will be necessary to have a good deal of background in-
formation, which may be gathered either before or after the speech
event itself is recorded. Such information should include as many a6
possible of the positions in society, or socially defined statuses
that the perticipant occupies. For exemple, it is not enough to say
that Mr. Smith, a forty-two-year-old man spoke baby talk to his son.
Mr. Smith's relevant statuses as defined by society must be noted. He
may be classified, for example, as an elder who 4s an important person
in his community and is expected to act with dignity at all times. It
is important to record, therefore, not only the participants * roles
vis-a-vis each other, but also the statuses each holds in the wider
cultural context.
The setting not only involves such information as time and place
but should also include the native definition of the situation. That
is to say, is it merely an informal speech event, or is it something
that is defined as a particular kind of social situation by the native
speakers themselves? What kinds of meaningful situations exist in any
Baby talk has been defined above rather narrowly, and in any cul-
ture terms that are primarily used for speaking to young children may
also be used in other situations, such as with animals, supernatural
beings, between lovers, and the like. It may be, also, that only a
small and specific part of baby talk is extended into other areas. All
such extended uses should be thoroughly investigated.
5
Children may imitate the adult use of baby talk when speaking to
other small children. This imitative behavior will often provide in-
portant clues to the child's impressions of and competence with adult
speech. (See Section 1.5.2, above.)
Belief System
It is important to investigate not only what people do with baby
talk but also what they think about it and what they think they are
doing with it. It is important to ask what the purpose of baby talk
is considered to be: Is it to facilitate teaching the child to speak?
Is it easier for the child to hear? Is it an imitation of child
speech? Is it an expression of affection? Does baby talk inhibit
| the child's acquisition of normal speech? At what age should children
stop using baby talk? What kinds of sanctions should be applied to
force the child to stop using baby talk? Are adults embarrassed about
using baby talk? and so on.
. Geen | a
a
Some of these questions my be asked directly of adult infor-
mants (see Section 1.6, below), but others, such as whether adults are
embarrassed about using baby telk, may have to be discovered by ob-
servation of situations in which baby talk is being used. Data ob-
= tained from observing the use of baby talk may then be contrasted
with what adults have said about its use.
In addition, recordings of adults using baby talk my be played
back to them and information gathered on their reactions; for example,
surprise, embarrassment, and so on. Hypothetical situations may be
given or tape recordings of baby talk played back to informants, who
may then be questioned about the situation, the participants, and the
setting and asked to give their interpretations and their attitudes
concerning it. The reaction of informants to accounts of baby-talk
= practices in other cultures may be obtained to discover their atti-
| tudes concerning its use.
Additional information on baby talk can be found in Casagrande
] [1948] and Ferguson [1956, 1964].)
®
|
\%
Pig eh ge hn
1.5.4. Communicative Routines
Because of their brevity and surface predictability, some kinds
of communicative routines are easy to identify. Routines mean utter-
ances which are predictable or contain predictable segments. They in-
volve very smll classes of alternatives. They are predictable from
the social situation, and include two main types, prescribed features
known to participants, and normal features of which participants are
not usually aware. Since the former are easier to identify, we will
treat them here, and reserve the latter for Section 3.5.3, The Analy-
Sis of Natural Converse tion.
1) Situation boundary markers. Within the daily cycle, there
are routines marking changes of locale, activity, or participants.
They are similar to rites of passage in the life cycle, making clear
to everyone that a new phase has commenced. Examples are greetings,
farewells, hosts' welcomes, pre- and post-prandial comments like
"bon appétit"™ or grace, remarks proper to entering or leaving parti-
cular locales.
2) Accident markers. Unpredictable events like sneezes,
belching, tripping, or dropping something may be followed by routines.
The actor or some particular other may be expected to perform the
routine.
3) Apologies are comments pertaining to violations of social
rules. They may occur prior to violation, in the form of asking
permission, or afterwards. In the latter case they might overlap
with accident markers. One can conceive that both might occur for the
same event--e.g. an apology by a sneezer, and “salud” by his companion.
4) Thanks refers to verbal compensation when goods or services
are offered or received from another.
5) Requests refers to complex functional category, all those
utterances which have the effect of eliciting goods and services from
others. In English, not all requests contain routines like "please,"
"would you mind..." “could you..." Requests may be more dif-
ferentiated according to the social category of the addressee than
other forms, so they provide a nice indicator of social learning.
6) Gesture-word games. While purely verbal games are discussed
in Section 3.5.2, we may include in routines those classes of utter-
ances which occur only in the situation of a stereotyped gesture or
performance. For instance, in European cultures, babies receive such
gesture-word games from adults. Some, like "cou-cou" or “peek-a-boo,”
Section 1.5.4 was written by Susan M. Ervin-Tripp.
ee
47
start as passive audience games for the child, but later children will
act and speak, or act on command of the word. "Bye-bye" and waving,
"pat-a-cake" and clapping have the same relation. While the words may
for the child function as names of the activity, there is a difference
from other activity names in that one rarely occurs without the other,
at least in the adult performance.
Many of these categories can require the inclusion of address
terms. Thus in French one does not use greetings or farewells with-
out some address term. For this reason, routines may provide a con-
text in which appropriate terms of address are acquired and can be
studied.
Some Problems to Study
Since the categories above have different properties, we would
not expect them to be mastered at the same age. Some considerations
to take into account in doing a study of these forms are these:
1) Forms requiring merely that the child respond to a routine
initiated by someone else can begin as early as any comprehension of
language. So waving in response to “pye-bye" could be found quite
early.
2) Reciprocal routines, where two parties say the same thing,
should appear early since they can be cued by mimicry. For this
reason situation boundary markers might appear earlier than apologies
or thanks, provided they are reciprocal. So when an adult says
"hello" the child can too.
3) One might expect some forms of error to be common. For ex-
ample, non-reciprocal "thank you" might be interpreted by the child
as merely a label for exchanging things. If this is the case, we might
find him using it when he gives objects, not just when he receives
them. Also, the form might decline in frequency when the frequency of
labeling declines, in the third year.
4) If selection of the routine is based on complex social stimli
the routine should be learned late. Thus, we might expect apologies to
appear later than greetings.
>
5) If the categories of events requiring the routine are complex,
we might expect selective usage. For example, in Japanese apologies
are differentiated in a complex fashion. Some classes of infraction
may not elicit apologies from children at first, and there may be over-
generalization of the routines. There are interesting semantic problems
in studying these overgeneralizations.
6) Short isolated phrases like "please" should be easier to learn
as routines than syntactically bound utterance segments like "canI.. ."
and “may I..." It would be valuable to locate instances where
there are functionally equivalent alternatives with different lin-
guistic properties, to see which is learned earlier, and which is
used more often in explicit instruction.
7) Where there is evidence of social differentiation in fre-
quency of routines with different addressees, it would be useful to
check instructional practices to see if they support the difference.
For instance, if a child says "please" less often to his age-mates
than seniors, is this because he is more often reprimanded for omis-
sion when addressing seniors?
8) A variety of instructional methods are likely to be ob-
servable. Routines being fixed, like lexical units, they can be
taught either by mimicry ("say 'please'"), correction of deviant or
omitted routines, or simply by letting the child mimic whatever
occurs naturally, without any special tuition.
Methods
We suggest four routes to obtaining data on routines, including
all the children in the sample.
1) Notice instructional behavior during other observational
sessions. Even with babies in the babbling stage, there may be in-
struction in simple gesture games, waving, and so on.
2) Include questions about speech etiquette in interviews.
3) Note the appearance of repeated forms at fixed points in so-
cial situations. The analyst's problems in identifying such forms in
adult usage, or in the usage of the older children, may suggest some
hypotheses to test in the children's acquisition.
4) Identify situational slots, and look for regularities in
verbal or gestural behavior in these situations. It might be desirable
to find adults or older children as points to begin such a study. How-
ever, just as in the case of vocabulary or grammatico-semantic cate-
gories like negation the match of semantic category and verbal repre-
sentation may not be the same as for adults at first, one should look
for any regularities of behavior in these situations, whether or not
they match the adult routine. For instance, whereas adults in a family
may say "goodnight" before retiring, children may kiss or wave. This
difference may or may not be a result of deliberate instruction of chil-
dren. Waving might arise from generalization from farewells. On the
other hand, caretakers may invent boundary markers to help control chil-
dren's activities.
Sampling
Once an analysis is made of the routines employed in the adult cul-
ture, one should try to collect evidence from each of the children A-X
a
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kg
for the appropriate situation. Some, like accidental events, may not be
possible to observe easily in the children explicitly selected for the
sample. However, if one is alert to the categories, in the course of
the year some other children in the same age bracket may substitute.
Where the situation elicits the action, as in thanks end the situation
| poundary markers, one can simply semple those situations on purpose.
a
1.6. LINGUISTIC BELIEF SYSTEMS
Anthropologists have traditionally made a distinction between !
: what people do, what they say they do, and what they think they should
do. Most of this manual is devoted to discovering what people do when
learning their language as children and what they do as adults in the
presence of children learning languages. In this section we address
ourselves to the task of discovering what adults report that they and
their children do in the language-learning situation, and what they
say they should do to assure rapid and complete language learning on
the part of their children.
This information is best obtained, of course, in an interview
situation. Before beginning to conduct interviews, the investigator
should carefully read the sections on the use of interpreters and
interviewing of informants in the Field de for a st of social-
ization (Whiting et al., 1966, pp. is6-ith = volume which each in-
vestigator should have with him in the field.
For comparative purposes, we suggest @ specific list of interview
questions below. This should be considered a minimal list, and all
researchers should ask at least these questions. It is by no means a
complete list, however, and additional questions will undoubtedly oc-
cur to the investigator while in the field. Neither is it necessary
for the questions to be put to the informants in the exact form pre-
sented here. This list is designed to serve more as & check list for
the investigator than as an interview schedule to be strictly followed.
(See Section 2.3 for additional cautions on the use of native infor-
mants, assistants, and interpreters. )
We suggest that this section of the study be carried out at the
beginning of the stay for a number of reasons: It is one of the
language and speech. And,perhaps more important, it will introduce
the investigator to the community and give its members some idea of what
he is doing there.
A beginning step in the investigation of a people's belief system
concerning language, perhaps, should be a familiarization on the part
of the investigator with the metalanguage used in the culture for dis-
cussing speech behavior. Concepts equivalent to such English words
as "word," "crying," "cooing," "babbling," etc. should be learned and
Section 1.6 was written by Keith Kernan. —
|
[| ee ee ee eee
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clearly understood. This might be best done with the help of a bi-
lingual assistant who is clearly aware of the investigator's aims and
interests. in
Beliefs regarding language learning should not be collected from
& single segment of the populetion. such as parents of young children;
rather, some sort of selection proc:cure should be used which will
assure representation in the sample of all culturally relevant groups.
Answers should be collected, for exemple, from men as well as women,
from adults as well as children, from parents as well as couples with-
out children, from parents with c.der children as well as parents with
younger children, etc. (As a miiimal sample, the mothers of children
A-F, M, N, Q, R, YW, and X should be interviewed, as indicated in
Table 2.) In addition to such obvious and easily identifiable cate-
gories of individuals as those just mentioned, there may be additional
groups which are more difficult to identify and which are formed by
criteria which may be unique to the particular culture being investi-
gated. Social class, however defined in the minds of the people of
the culture, might be an important determine of attitudes concerning
beliefs about language acquisition, for example.
Since group membership may be an important factor in beliefs con-
cerning language acquisition, it will be necessary to record informa-
tion concerning each informant questioned. Some of this information
will undoubtedly be determined by the types of relevant groups which
exist in the culture. Whether an individual is a member of an or-
ganized religion, for example, may be important in some cultures and
not in others. For this reason, it would seem wise to record as mech
biographical data as possible for each informant at the beginning of
the project at least. Checking answers to questions against biograph-
ical data while in the field my lead to the discovery of interesting
covariations which will enable the formation of preliminary hypothe-
ses and point to the uselessness of some biographical data which had
been collected in the past and the necessity for obtaining other more
relevant facts.
In addition to culturally specific facts such as caste membership
which might be suspected by the investigator to have possible relevance
in determining beliefs about language acquisition, a minimal amount
of biographical information would include the following:
1. Age
2. Sex
3- Occupation
4. Socioeconomic status as defined by the criteria of the
culture itself
5. Monolingual or multilingual
(non-native languages spoken)
6. Number of children
7. Sex of children
8. Ages of children
OR 6 Tn A Rao
Seaotpiienas een oneal
52
9. Amount and type of education
10. Place of residence
11. Number of people in household
12. Relationship of otner individuals in household
to the informant
13. Number of siblings
14. Age of siblings
F 15. Sex of siblings
“7 16. Age of parents
: 17. Education of parents
18. Occupation of parents
19. Socioeconomic status of parents
20. Place of residence of parents
21. Languages spoken by parents
Suggested Minimal Interview Concerning Beliefs about Language Acquisi-
tion and Use:
A. Pre-Verbal Vocal Behavior
1. At what age does an infant begin to make sounds?
2. Can you describe these sounds? -
3. Does he make these sounds at any particular time of day?
h. Does he make these sounds in any particular situations?
5. Does he make different sounds in different situations?
6. Why does he make these sounds?
7. Does the child mean anything by these sounds?
8. Is he trying to speak when he makes these sounds?
9. Do you understand what he means or wants when he makes
these sounds? ,
10. Do all babies make the same sounds before they are able
to speak?
11. Can anyone at all understand what the baby wants or
means when he makes these sounds?
12. Do babies understand adult speech before they learn to
talk?
13. Can babies think before they learn to speak?
14. Do babies imitate adult sounds?
15. At what age does this imitation begin?
16. What is the easiest sound for a baby to imitate?
17. Is this sound learned first?
18. What is the most difficult sound for a baby to imitate?
19. Is this sound learned last?
20. Would a baby learn how to speak if no one ever talked
to him?
21. Do you speak in a special way with babies (e.g., louder,
softer, faster, etc.)?
22. Does anyone speak in a special way with babies?
23. Who doesn't speak in a special way with babies?
2k, Do you use special words with babies?
25. What are these special words? 7
23
26. Are these words easier for the baby to understand?
27. Does the us2 of these words make it easier for the
baby to learn to speak?
28. Does the use of these words retard the baby’s learn-
ing adult speech?
: 29. At what age is the child when you stop talking to him
| like this?
B. The Acquisition of Speech a
| : lL. How does a child learn to speak? Must he be taught?
2. Do children learn to speak by hearing others and
imitating them?
3. What is the first word a child usually learns to speak?
Ls 4. At about what age does he learn this word?
5. Does he use it correctly?
( | 6. Does it mean the same thing to him as it does to adults?
é 7. If not, what did it mean to him and how did he use it
incorrectly?
r 8. At what age do children begin to put words together?
: | } ; 9. Do they put them together correctly?
10. What kinds of mistakes do children make in the sounds
* of words?
i ll. What kinds of mistakes ‘do children make in putting
= words together to form sentences?
12. Do all children mke mistakes in sounds and ‘putting
| words together?
i | 13. Do all children make the same mistakes in sounds and
putting words together?
4 14. Do boys or girls make more mistakes when learning to
speak?
, 15. Do boys or girls learn to speak earlier?
q 16. Do any children learn to speak earlier than others?
! 17. Why do some children learn to speak earlier than others?
18. Is it beneficial to the child to learn to speak early?
19. Is there anything that can be done to make a child learn
to speak earlier than usual?
From whom does the child learn most of his language?
21. Is it better that the child learn his language from
some people than from others?
j | - 22. Do children learn many words from other children?
23. What kinds of words do children learn from other
children?
24. Do children ever invent new words?
a 25. Are the words that children invent ever used by other
: people?
26. Do children ever ask other people the names of things?
27. At what age do children begin to ask the names of
things?
28. Whom do children usually ask the names of things?
29. What kinds of things do children usually ask to be named?
30. Do children ever ask the meaning of words?
nN
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54
C.
31. Whom do children usually ask the meaning of words?
32. How do you think a child should be answered when he asks
the meaning of a word? Can you give me an exemple?
33. What kinds of mistekes do children make in speaking?
Examples?
34, Should a child be corrected when he misprewounces @ word,
makes a mistake in putting words together, cr calls some-
thing by the wrong name?
35. How should he be corrected?
36. Should anyone who hears a child make a mistake correct
the child?
37. From whom do children learn "not nice" words?
38. What should be done when a child uses a "no? nice” word?
39. Do children learn to speak better or more correctly by
going to school?
ho. Do you think there are many times when children should
not talk?
41. Why do you think it is wrong for children to speak at
these times?
4O. How should children be taught not to talk at these times?
43. Should children speak differently to adults than to
other children? If so, in what way and how is the child
taught this?
hh. How do you feel when your child makes a mistake in his
speech in the presence of adults? Are you embarrassed?
45, Do you think it is important for a child to learn to
speak well?
46. If so, why is it important for a child to learn to speak
well?
47, Is it more important for some children to be able to
speak well than for others?
48. Is it more important for boys or for girls to be able
to speak well?
49. Do children have any word games or special languages?
Can you describe them?
50. At what age do children begin to speak like adults and
not make mistakes?
51. Do all children learn to speak like adults at about the
same time?
Speech Behavior and Ability
1. Are some people better speakers than others?
2. In what way are they better speakers?
3. How did they become better speakers?
h. Are there any advantages to being a good speaker?
5. Who do you know that's a good speaker?
6. Are some people poorer speakers than most people?
7. In what way are they poorer speakers?
8. Are there any disadvantages to being a poor speaker?
9. Who do you know that's a poor speaker?
10. Do you know anyone who makes mistakes in his speech or
sounds strange when he speaks (i.e., pathologies )?
29
11. What causes this pathology?
12. Do you have a term for this strange kind of speech or
for people who speak like this?
13. Do you know of any other kinds of mistakes in speech or
strange sounding speech (i.e., other speech pathologies )?
What do you call them?
14. What causes these speech pathologies?
15. Can anything be done to correct these speech pathologies?
16. Are some people more likely to have any of these speech
pathologies than other people?
17. Do you know anyone who speaks more than one language?
18. What ere the languages they speak?
19. Is it advantegeous or disadvantageous to be able to
speak more than one language? In what way?
20. Do you think it's a good idea for children to learn to
speak more than one language? Why?
21. What additional languages do you think children should
learn to speak? Why?
22. At what age should children learn to speak another
language?
23. Does learning a second lenguage hinder or improve
ability with the first language? }
2h, Is it easier for some people to learn to speak another
language than it is for other people? Why?
25. Are some languages easier for people, who already speak
your language, to learn? Why?
D. Language in General
1. How do you think your language began?
2. Why are languages different?
3. Are some lauguages easier to speak than others? Why?
4h, Are some languages better sounding than others?
5. Can one say things in one language that couldn't be
said in another language?
6. What do you think people would be like if there were
no languages?
7. Do you think it would be a good idea if everyone spoke
the same language? Why?
8. What language should that be?
9. Do animals have any kind of a language? Which animals?
10. Can animals understand human language?
11. Can humans understand animal languages?
12. Is your language changing?
13. In what way is your language changing?
14. Do you think it is good or bad that your language is
changing?
15. Where do new words come from?
1.7. NOTES AND QUERIES FOR OBSERVATION
What follows is a scattered selection of issues » questions, and
reminders which the investigator should try to keep at the top of his
mind. This section should be scanned every few days, and the entire
Manual should be scanned every few weeks. The investigator should
faithfully keep a daily journal, in which he includes not only prob-
lems raised in the Manual, but comments about his own mood, the
weather, the social climate, and so on--such variables may have an im-
portent effect upon the scientific observations. (See discussion of
daily log in the Whiting et al. Field guide [1966, p. 166].)
Recording
Do not be seduced by the ease of tape recording vast amounts of
data. Remember: it will take at least as long to listen to a tape as
it did to record it, and much longer to analyze or transcribe it!
Clean and lubricate the tape heads about once a week, and de-
magnetize the tape heads (if required by the type of machine) about
once a month.
Observe Children
What devices do children have for initiating information ex-
changes--e.g. tugging, turning face, using openers like "do you know
what?" Whom does the child address?
Do children know proverbs, riddles, poems, chants, songs, prayers,
etc.? How is musical development related to language development? Do
children play musical instruments? How well can children of different
ages sing back a melody or beat back a rhythm? Do the children dance?
is there musical training? Are people expected to be creative musi-
cally? To appreciate music? Are there formal musical performances?
Do children go to them?
Watch children play. What do they argue about? Who wins and
why? Do they argue about the rules of the game? Is winning ever re-
lated to verbal skills? Try to observe children playing at adult roles
as @ means of determining their notions of adult speech styles and role
behaviors.
What chores are done by children of various ages and sexes? What
are children expected to be able to do? To understand?
Watch for cases of children using baby talk.
Section 1.7 was written by Dan I. Slobin.
Pay special attention to late-occurring errors, as these reveal
points of special difficulty in language acquisition.
How do children categorize other people in terms of variables such
as age, status, sex, relationship, etc.?
Observe Adults Relating to Children
Where are little children carried? If on someone's back, does the
child face forward, and can vocal interaction occur?
What is the physical distance between speakers and listeners? Is
this adjusted to the age and height of the listener? Where do adults
_gtand in addressing children of different ages? Do they attempt to
establish eye contact?
What devices do adults use for getting a child's attention? How
is a child called when he is out of sight? When he is within sight but
out of reach? When he is within reach?
How is a child sent to get something?
How does an adult stop a child from doing something? How is a
child treated if he interrupts a conversation between adults? How is
a child scolded? Threatened? (What is the lexicon for verbal punish-
ment?) Is praise or blame verbally administered by adults to children?
What language modeling behavior is structured specifically for
children? (E.g. fairy tales containing stylistic emphasis and repeti-
tion, rhymes, chants, instructional materials, etc.). Do adults read
to children? Tell them stories?
How is reading taught, and who teaches it? What are the atti-
tudes of children and parents towards learning to read and towards
reading?
Pay special attention to adults' responses to children's speech.
At what age does speech become an object of explicit correction? Up
until what age do adults correct a child's speech? What aspects of
speech are corrected at various ages? How do children respond to
speech corrections?
What are children of different ages expected to be able to give
verbal accounts of? (E.g. "what did you do in school today?" “What
did you see at the circus?") Do children take part in dinner-table
cohversation? Is there any special time or place for dialog between
adults and children?
How are children with deviant language or language deficiency
treated? How are the deaf treated? How are the blind treated?
Language
What is the native terminology for language, speech, speech acts,
etce.? Is there a term for stuttering? (Does stuttering occur?) Are
other speech disturbances labeled?
Be alert to the use of special styles of speaking at all times.
If there are children's books, what is the style and content of
such books?
Pay special attention to address forms and third person reference
(pronouns, names, kin terms, etc.).
Are there word games, puns, riddles, limericks, etc.?
Social Structure
Observe sex-linked interaction in the community in order to de-
termine the role played by your own sex in interacting with various
categories of people.
What role does birth order play in the society? Are special
privileges and/or burdens dependent upon birth arder?
What settings are children admitted to or excluded from on the
basis of language mastery?
What ritual and religious events occur in the community? Who
participates? What is done? How are children initiated into religious
rites?
Linguistic Exercises
Do a close phonetic transcription of a text, pushing your phonetic
skills to the limit to force attention to details. (This should be
done about four months after arrival in the field.)
Ask natives to teach you proper speech etiquette for interacting
with various kinds of people.
Try to get children to teach you the language, and to help you
understand the speech of other children.
Present native informants with sentences uttered by children and
ask them to say each sentence so it sounds right (or some such in-
struction). This should give you som information about the systematic
regularities in the child's language which are deviant from the adult
language, and some general notions of areas of difficulty in the lan-
guage acquisition process.
Go through a published grammar of the language with a native in-
formant and have him comment on it in the light of actual usage.
Iearn songs, poems, chants, etc.
Alert natives to the variables you are interest in, and see what
sorts of data they bring you.
Dell Hymes' Questions
(The following questions were posed by Dell Hymes in his paper
"Linguistic aspects of studying personality cross-culturally" | 196 j
and ae among the original stimuli for the construction of this field
manual.
Societies may differ not only in the age at which children
typically acquire speech, but also in the context of its acquisi-
tion. For any society, one would want answers to such questions
as: When is the child considered capable of understanding speech?
(Among the Tlingit, "when the infant is but a few months old the
mother talks to him, tells him moral tales, 'trains him'"). Is
acquisition of speech accompanied by pressure, or treated as
something that comes in due course? Are there special word
games or speech patterns for teaching children? If there is
pressure, at what stage of psychosexual development is the
pressure applied? When are other socialization pressures applied,
before or after the acquisition of speech? Various writings make
clear that pressure, deprivation, and overprotection may variously
induce speech defects or the preservation of infantile speech
habits. = e *
Other questions: to what extent is a child rewarded by
verbal praise, in cotrast to material rewards such as candy,
or physical affection? To what extent is the child punished
by verbal reprimand, as opposed to deprivation, or physical
pain? What is the conception of proper speech behavior on the
part of the child, relative to particular persons and behavior
settings? Are a child's questions about words and meanings wel-
comed or rebuffed? Overall, is a child allowed much or little
oral gratification through speech? Is a child encouraged, dis-
couraged, or ignored in efforts to find satisfaction in speech
play? What is the proportion of speech activity to communica-
tion by other means, such as gestures, on the part of the child?
Are there special settings for verbal instruction of chil-
dren? If there are, how frequent and with what personnel, and
about what topics? Is the instruction conventionalized in con-
tent as are proverbs and myths, or only in theme? Is the tone
of instruction categorical (as among many American Indian groups)
or not (as in West Africa)? Is sex involved? ...
PART TwO
METHODOLOGICAL FACTORS
2.1. CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
On arriving at a field site, there are a few heuristic devices in-
vestigators can use to help them identify the most important speech
varieties, and on the basis of these varieties, the aspects of the so-
cial structure which they must describe.
Members of different speech groups or individuals in aifferent
speech situations may change their speech in a variety of ways: (1)
topics or functions of interaction are likely to be changed; (2) lin-
guistic codes for representing the same functions may be changed; (3)
linguistic features organized as a code may differ; and (4) vocal
signals may be altered. Sources for further detailed reading are given
below in this section. Dell Hymes' Language in culture and society
(1964) contains pertinent material in Parts V and VII, and Shuy's Social
dialects and language learning (1964) includes relevant articles by
Bailey, Labov, and Stewart.
Contrastive analysis is important for this project because it is
necessary to identify linguistic contrasts in order to know whether
and when children begin to produce stylistic shifts. They may of
course use style shifting which is not similar to adult shifting; in
such a case an analysis of child tapes similar to the analysis of the
adult tapes described below will be necessary. In addition to & con-
trastive analysis of the speech varieties mastered by children at
various ages, it is important to understand which varieties are intel-
ible to them, and how the speech varieties known to them are evalu-
ated. Both comprehension and evaluative norms must develop with age,
and possibly there are some sharp changes with formal training. These
points are discussed later in this section.
2.1.1. Methods
After a few months in the field, the investigator will be able to
observe on his own whether there are gross differences in speech be-
tween certain speakers, addressees, situations. To begin systematic
contrastive studies, there might be two starting points. One might be
Section 2.1 was written by Susan M. Ervin-Tripp.
61
to start with some general informant work. Later informant interviews
of course would be necessary to refine this information. The purpose
of the earlier work is the identification of same gross contrasts which
can help inform observations. For example, ask: "Can you tell if your
wife is talking to the baby or to your older son, even if you can't see
them?" "Can you tell if she is talking to & man or to a woman?" These
questions are based on the assumption that age and sex of addressee are
likely to be factors influencing speech in most societies. (See the
sample questionnaire in Section 1.6 for further instances.)
The data obtained from questionnaires of this sort have value (1)
to help identify some social comparisons one must be sure to include
in observations; and (2) to give indications of the stereotypes about
social variations in speech.
We know that such reports by informants give information about
only a small fraction of actual variation in speech. However, they
will suggest some starting points for observation. Formal observations
should include following the same speaker through a variety of situa-
tions in which there are different topics, different settings, and dif-
ferent addressees, as suggested in Section 1.5.1. One should be sure to
include the comparisons suggested by the interview comments as so marked
that even native speakers notice them.
Thus informant work and observation are both places to begin study-
ing speech variation. In the next phase of the study, informants can
act as listeners. Two tape recorders are linked by a patch cord to
allow recording on a new tape of selections from the field recording.
Then the natural recordings are edited to remove topical clues, proper
names, and references which can reveal the speech situation. The in-
formant should listen to the tape in order to try to identify the set-
ting and addressee. He may also be able to specify when he could make
the identification and may even notice what the marker was.
Tapes successfully recognized by adults can be played to children
of appropriate characteristics. In this way one can find when children
learn to recognize differences in speech in different settings or to
aifferent addressees, even if they do not themselves switch styles.
(See Section 3.5.1, The Acquisition of Usage Patterns. )
The next task is to identify the linguistic differences between
these tapes. In part this may be done efter the study is completed,
with the aid of a linguist. However, there are some advantages to
working in the field on the task of identifying distinctive linguistic
markers. For example, removing from a tape all but a single linguistic
difference can be used as a test for which markers are most important.
2.1.2. Style vs. Speaker
Contrastive analysis is possible for the speech of two different
speakers or for the speech of the same speaker in two different situa-
tions. There are some situations which allow for style switching (or
for language switching) and therefore these situations are not appropri-
ate for definitional purposes. If one knows the culture well enough,
one may be able to predict the circumstances under which even this
switching will occur.
Both types of contrast will prove relevant in this study. For
example, we want to know whether men and women have different speech,
since if they do we will want to be able to find out how children's
speech relates to the two norms and how the differentiation is rein-
forced. But we also want to know if men speak differently when ad-
dressing men and when addressing women, and whether these differences
show up in children's speech. The first is a contrast between speakers,
the second between styles.
While the same types of contrasts can exist in both of these cases,
there is a difference between them. The different styles co-exist in a
single speaker, and there are therefore some pressures towards merger
of systems. For example, at the phonetic, functional, and semantic
level, it is difficult for a single speaker to maintain two sets of
categories that are nearly identical but not quite. The two tend to
merge. In the extreme case, as Gumperz (1967) has found, the differ-
ences may be extremely minor, for bilinguals who have spoken with other
bilinguals over the centuries.
Thus contrasts may be relatively few for style differences. The
two systems tend to have a common core, with merely a few variables
which mark style switching. ‘The contrast between different speakers
will tend to be reduced in a similar way, if the speakers must inter-
act with each other often. For instance, men's and women's speech must
be similar in many ways since each must understand the other. They
must have a common core grammer since the rules for production and com-
prehension exist in the same persons and there are no"monolinguals."
In such cases there may merely be different phonetic realization rules
or other low-level differences.
Where some groups occupy desirable statuses and there is emulation,
style shifts may be related to speaker differences. Thus Labov (1966)
has suggested three levels of relationship depending on conscious aware-
ness of group differences and whether style shifts are apparent. In-
dicators are contrasted features which are unconscious, and define group
membership but are not used i style shifting. Markers do influence
style shifting so that in the more conscious and careful style the
normative version is used. Stereotypes are conscious and subject to
overt comment and stigma.
We shall confine our discussion to the last three types of contrast,
which we must assume can be revealed with topic and function held con-
stant.
2.1.3. Functional Realization
In American society,
formulated depending on the re
the request is considered part
extra. Direct imperatives tend to be
ample. A simple way to obtain such data in another society is to make
some simple categories like ‘bringing objects," “supplying simple in-
formation." One begins to see fairly quickly
ference in the formula used, according to the speaker or according to
the setting or addressee. Requests are the easiest function to identify,
since they are defined as any speech resulting in action on behalf of
the speaker by the other party. Greetings and other routines would also
be easy to study. (See Section 1.5.4, Communicative Routines. )
2.1.4. Linguistic Contrasts
The purpose of 4 linguistic contrastive analysis is to define as
variables those things which are not alike and to characterize all else
as alike. It is obviously impossible to do a complete linguistic an-
alysis, but any category described for one system should be described
for the other. It is important to try to locate the contrasts that are
sufficiently frequent in texts to permit their practical use &s cri-
teria for identifying shifting in children. Each instance should be
analyzed for its systematic implications, not given merely as an isolated
example, and in each case the equivalent rule in the other system should
be analyzed. Enough phonetic detail should be given to define phonetic
realization rules, where there are likely to be many style variables.
2.1.4.1. Phonological Contrasts
The easiest clue to a difference in the phonological systems is
comparison of realization rules for the same morphemes. Clever intro-
duction of topics while eliciting comparison tapes can help in locating
the same morphemes in contrasted texts. Otherwise, one may have to make
judgments that the morphemes are sufficiently similer in phonemic struc-
ture to permit one to reach conclusions without having the identical
forms.
1) Two systems may differ in the phonetic features they use. One
system may have a set of palatalized consonants but the other not, so
that in the simpler system the other's 7 talized forms" are homonymous
with the non-palatalized. In "Diglossia" (1959), Ferguson describes
eases in high and low styles which differ in that the low system is sin-
pler, and includes 4 subset of the phonemes in the high system.
2) One system may have @ special set of allophonic changes which
the other does not have. These may introduce sounds or features not
present in the other.
a AUD a ei bed Bo
ee ei A A ES A A ORT A A A
3) A particular item may be present phonemically in one system
and not in the other, as in the contrast between English dialects with
and without post-vocalic /r/.
4) A part of the system may coalesce in one system but not in the
other. For example in New York City Labov (1966) noted that the vowel
systems employed different contrasted categories which in a different
style were coalesced. In a similar way, the distinction between alveolar
stops and fricatives tended to disappear in spontaneous speech. In
these cases the variables must be measured since there is not likely to
be sharp shifting but increases and decreases in the likelihood of making
the distinctions that exist in only one of the systems. Casual speech,
in which the fewest distinctions were made, was more systematic and con-
sistent than styles approaching "standard English."
5) Phonetic realization of shared phonemes is usually different
in different styles. In baby talk in English there is palatalization
of many consonants, in comparison to the normal style. (These may be
features added to specific items describable segmentally or my be
long components added to a whole sequence, but tape analysis is neces-
sary to find out which is the case.)
6) Distribution according to syllable location may be different;
e.g. Labov describes an English dialect in which /s/ + stop is not per-
mitted in syllable final position. Also, though /6/ and /£/ and their
voiced counterparts are distinctive in other positions, they are both
realized as labiodentals in final position.
7) Morpheme formation canons may differ so that when morphemes
are adapted to the other system their structure mast be changed. For
example, English words integrated into Japanese bilinguals’ speech may
have added vowels to form CV syllables.
8) Phonemic realization of the same morpheme may be different,
e.g. English "ing" may be realized variously as /in/, /in/, and /iyn/
in different styles, the second two being formal.
2.1.4.2. Lexical and Morphological Contrasts
Morphological contrasts are obvious if high-frequency inflectional
morphemes are different in the two systems. Stewart (in Shuy, 1964)
describes such contrasts between two systems of English inflection.
For example, "I see it (today)" vs. "I see it (yesterdey)." This
system may differ either at the morphological or at the semantic level
from standard English which contrasts present and preterite. However,
the presence in the same system of "I don't see it (today)" and "I ain't
see it (yesterday)" indicates that there is an underlying contrast in
categories which simply is neutralized in the affirmative.
When there are lexical differences it is necessary to be assured
that the base meaning for the two forms is similer. Examples in English
are "dyad" and "couple," "policeman" and "fuzz," "children" and "kids."
eee ey ye —
Note that there may be some connotative differences due to the partici-
pation of these forms in systems which differ in connotations, e.g. in
attitudes toward police. Whenever in another culture you find alterna-
tive words with "the same meanings" look for stylistic or speaker differ-~-
ences restricting selection.
2.1.4.3. Syntactic Contrasts
One strategy in identifying syntactic contrasts is to get an infor-
mant to translate from one system into the other, and then see if this
translation can be reduced to a word-for-word translation which a third
informant will accept (Gumperz, 1967). If there is difficulty in trans-
lation from one system to the other, which may be the case with style
shifting, then you might be able to rewrite the text making morphologi-
cal substitutions and, using an informant, see if it is possible to make
an acceptable text from this word-for-word translation you have made.
The measure of syntactic difference between two systems is the number
of order changes and other syntactic rules you need to produce an ac-
ceptable translation from the word-for-word text.
An example of a syntactic difference of sufficiently high fre-
quency to be useful is the contrast between English dialects requiring
subject-verb agreement in number and not having this agreement. An-
other difference, though less observable because rarer, is between
systems which have a past and future perfect and those which realize
this semantic difference by the use of adverbials and clauses.
Two styles or two dialects of languages may differ in semantic
categories, in semological features cross-cutting categories, and so
on. It is important to distinguish between three easily confused forms
of contrast. If we compare speech to adults and to children we might
find that there were different topics selected from the range available
to the speaker. If a given topic is selected which is not usual for
the speech of an adult to a child, the adult may have to make semantic
distinctions which are not available in the system of speech to children.
Either he tries to teach the distinction or must avoid this feature of
the topic. Finally, there may be a distinction present which is
characterized by different lexical selections. He might use the term
"acquisition" to an adult in making the same semantic distinction he
makes in talking about "getting" or "buying" to a child.
There may be differences in the semantic systems which underlie
grammatical or morphological rules in two systems. For instance, in
Stewart's analysis of "basilect" (in Shuy, 1964) there is a contrast
between a simple perfect and a completive perfect, as realized in we
seen it" and "I been seen it."
2.1.5. Vocal Signals
Vocal signals may be noted for two reasons. One is that they may
constitute "channel cues" that there is a shift of style taking place
(Labov, 1966). If there is a sudden increase in speed, fluency, a
67
change in pitch, there may be an indication that a shift has occurred.
Usually some topical and linguistic variables will also change about
the same time.
Another reason for noting vocal signals is that they may then-
selves constitute systems which change when style shifts. For example,
syllable dynamics and voice quality may change in two dialects. Pause
markers differ--e.g. unh in English, este in Mexican Spanish, palatal-
ized nasal in Russian. Falsetto is used for particular purposes in some
types of Negro speech. Special combinations of prosodic rules may have
particular semantic significance in one system and not in the other--
e.g. 2@ sudden downward shift in pitch at a stressed adjective in a sen-
tence in standard English implies irony.
The most exhaustive list of vocal signals is given in Pittenger,
Hockett, and Danehy (1960). We include these simply as reminders of
items to listen for.
Quality changes which may differ from the norm in being above or
below it, utilizing a wider or narrower range of variation than is
usual, include loudness, pitch, and rate, including drawling and clip-
ping. For example, speech to babies my have a wider range of pitch
variation than to older childreN,as well as generally higher pitch.
Voice qualities which have been noted include rasp or metallic
quality, glissando or slurring of pitch changes, breaking of glottal
tone, as in incipient crying, breathiness, nasality, resonance, ex-
treme vocal openness, slurring. Momentary effects which could be used
for stylistic purposes are inhalation or exhalation, hissing, clicking,
sighs, silence, yawming, crying, laughing, whispering, and so on.
One of the great difficulties in previous use of these vocal sig-
nals in research is that since many of them do not have the discrete
signaling function of the ordinary speech channel, there has been no
clear guide to when a "complete" analysis has occurred. The emphasis
on contrast puts some inherent limits on what it is practical to in-
clude in the present study. We suggest that investigators who note
some overall differences between two styles in any of these features
try to locate the description in one of the published lists. A tape
is available for the Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy text permitting
calibration against their categories.
2.1.6. Intelligibility
In @ commnity where children are exposed to a varied set of lin-
guistic norms, it is important to find how early children can under-
stand varieties they hear. For example, children on the Navaho reserva-
tion go to the curing sings from infancy on; by school age they have
control over a surprising repertoire of chants. On the other hand, if
asked to interpret the text of a chant, they might fail, because of its
special lexicon. :
2.1.6.1. Glossing a Text
- A traditional method for assessing intelligibility is to ask an
informant to provide a translation or explanation of a sample of the
speech variety. One could probably make gross differentiations, but
it might be difficult to evaluate the adequacy of two accounts of this
kind.
2.1.6.2. Repetition
Repeating or imitating a tape is a useful test if there are codes
with syntactical differences and the speakers in each group do not use
each other's speech forms. For example, Labov has asked Harlem adoles-
cents to repeat "He asked if I could go to the game today," and con-
sistently received as an accurate imitation "He asked could I go to
the game today." In this case the informant translated from one diae-
lect to the other, keeping the meaning. Note that asking informants in
this case to provide a gloss would seem strange.
2.1.6.3. "Cloze"
On a tape, one can excise every nth item, and ask informants to
guess what was said. (This is called the "Cloze" technique. Refer-
ences to its use can be found in Ervin-Tripp & Slobin, 1966, pp. M-5.)
This seems to an informant like trying to listen through noise. If the
original and reconstructed texts are compared, the similarities can be
counted objectively. For example, Peisach (1965) used the method for
first and fifth grade children varying in race and socioeconomic status.
For the first graders she omitted the last word in each sentence. She
found that by the fifth grade the social classes differed only when IQ
was not controlled, when their guessing of the teacher's speech was
tested.
There are several precautions in the use of Cloze. Elaborated
speech may be very hard to reconstruct, even for someone close to the
speaker. Since different values of n or a different location of
omission can have a pronounced effect, it is better to compare infor-
mants listening to the same tape than to compare tapes or styles. For
instance, once a tape is prepared, one could compare children of dif-
ferent ages. Or one could compare children of different age or other
status.
All of these methods could also be used across languages in mlti-
lingual commnities. For studies of multilingual variety, as well as
dialectal variety, one should remember that the prestige of the spoken
variety may markedly influence the intelligibility to the listener and
their willingness to repeat it.
2.1.7. Evaluation
Both Lambert and Labov have used subjective evaluation tests to
determine unconscious attitudes towards speech varieties. In a series
eet
| 2 ~~»
69
of studies of a variety of bilingual commmities, Lambert and his col-
leagues (Anisfeld & Lambert, 1964; Lambert, 1967; Lambert et al., 1966)
have found that the same voice was evaluated differently depending on
the phonological system it used. Thus Canadian judges rated a man with
an English Canadian speech guise as more intelligent and competent than
the seme man in a French Canadian guise.
Labov (1966) has used a similar method in studying the evaluation
of speech variables within a monolingual community. He constructed
passages containing the forms that had the phonological’ indicators in
which he was interested. Then he took carefully selected sentences
from a test group which repeated these passages. He selected the sen-
tences to provide examples of given values of each speech variable.
Then listeners were asked to listen to each sentence and rate the
speaker. The ratings were rather more practical than the traits judged
by Lambert's informants. For instance the rater was asked to be an
employer and judge the highest job the speaker could hold. He found
that in New York City the use of a dental fricative in thing raised a
speaker's judged job suitability but lowered his toughness or masculin-
ity. |
When are these values acquired? Lembert found that they showed
up by 12 in the inter-language situation. Labov, dealing with the com-
plexity of urban dialects, found changes ‘still taking place up until
20. Presumably formal training institutions could have a marked im-
mediate effect on attitudes towards speech varieties. Both Labov and
Lambert have found that values about speech variation can be shared
even between speakers who themselves speak quite differently.
If there is any form of speech stratification in the community
studied, it would be of value to prepare a stimulus tape for evaluation
studies with children. If possible, talented speakers who can "shift"
are the best for making such recordings. In a literate community, avoid
the use of reading for getting comparable texts. If necessary, get
repetitions of oral material for control over content; reading intro-
duces a whole new set of artificialities into speech.
———————ll—E>—EE
ee te ef
2.2. RECORDING APPARATUS AND TECHNIQUES
2.2.1. Apparatus
Tape recorders come in different sizes, price ranges, qualities,
and types. If the field situation is in a city it is then possible
and even advantageous to use a heavier machine operating on house cur-
rent in order to record stereophonically, particularly if more than
one person is being recorded at a time. On the other hand, outside
of a city it will be necessary to use a battery-operated tape recorder
that is as small and light as possible without sacrificing recording
fidelity unduly. This will rule out stero for a couple of years at
least. A number of good machines are currently on the market, such
as those put out by Uher, Tandberg, Nagra, Sony, and Ampex. In order
to simplify matters the Uher 4000 Report L and the Uher 4000 Report S
are here recommended for field situations in which house current is
not available during recording. Notwithstanding the fact that some
claim it to be less rugged than might be desirable, the Uher 4000 com-
bines such features as four speeds, battery or wall operation, good
fidelity, quality workmanship, and reasonable cost so as to leave it
with no real competitor. Although the Nagra surpasses it in fidelity,
the Nagra has only one speed and a very high price. The battery-
operated Sony lacks the fidelity and the versatility of four speeds
as well as reliability of its electronic components, although when
price is considered, the fidelity is very high indeed, and suitable for
many purposes.
It is advantageous, almost imperative, to bring two tape recorders
into the field, preferably of the same make and model. In the first
place if one breaks down the other can be used, and if both break down,
@ judicious combination of parts from each may yield one serviceable
machine. “In the second place, patching (recording from one machine to
another ) necessitates two tape recorders. Patching is used for editing
tapes, re-recording at a different speed, or re-recording on a tape of
a different thickness. In addition two recorders can be used for pro-
ducing a stimulus on one recorder and recording both the stimulus and
the listener's response on the other.
Transport
The means by which the tape is transported across the heads from
one reel to another is important for fidelity of reproduction. The
transport mechanism consists of one or more electric motors and a band
or rubber idler and capstan assembly to transfer the rotation from the
Section 2.2 was written by Brian Stross. (Additional advice on tape
recording can be found in Samarin, 1967, pp. 88-102.)
motor to the tape reels. It is important that the transport pulls the
tape across the heads evenly and smoothly at an invariable speed. Var-
jations in speed that produce unwanted distortions are called wow (slow
petter.
It is possible to purchase accessories for the testing of speed
accuracy, but these are usually not feasible for the field. One solu-
tion is to blow a 440-A pitchpipe before and after every recording. In
playing back the recording, the pitch on the tape should match the
pitch of any 440-A pitchpipe. This procedure should also allow one to
tell when the batteries are beginning to run down. The pitch of a re~-
cording made when the batteries were known to be in good condition
should at any time match the pitchpipe. A lower pitch means that the
transport is going slower ané the batteries may not be up to charge.
A higher pitch means that the tape speed is faster than normal in
which case it is likely that some tape has wound itself around the
capstan (probably because the plastic tips that hold the tape reels in
place were not given the half turn necessary to hold the tape in posi-
tion while the recorder is moved about). When this happens, the tape
wound around the capstan should be cut out or pulled off the capstan.
Heads
The heads are among the most critical features on a tape recorder.
They are tiny electromagnets that put material on the tape, pick up
recorded material to play it back, and erase tape. Most recorders un-
der consideration for fieldwork will have either quarter track or half-
track heads. The quarter-track machines double the playing and record-
ing time that would be given by a half track machine for the same
length of tape. On the other hand some fidelity is sacrificed by add-
ing tracks in that the signal to noise ratio is smaller on the quarter
track machines. The Uher is a half track.
Generally the quality of a recorder with three heads, one each
for recording, playing, and erasing, is better than one with only two
in which recording and playing are both done with a single head. The
compensation of the two-head machine is that it is easier to align the
head.
Volume Level Indicator
Input must be adjusted to the right level with the recording volume
knob in order to record the most efficiently. If the level is too lo, :
the signal will be weak and tape hiss plus other noise will drown out |
cme of the signal. If the level is too high then the signal will be '
distorted, a problem which is just as serious. There is one point at
which the signal to noise ratio is optimal. This point is indicated on
the VU meter, a volume level indicator, and is as close as possible to |
the red zone (the red zone being that area on the meter in which the 4
numbers have plus rather than minus values) without being in it. The
meter needle, which is moving with the input signal, must be kept as —
: close as possible to this optimm point at all times. However the
: needle should never enter the red zone. Sometimes, when there are wide
variations in the volume of the input, and when it is possible to some-
what predict these fluctuations, it is a good idea to adjust the volume
level by hand during recording to compensate for the variation while
maintaining a strong enough signal.
| Digital Counter
This is a device very similar to the odometer on a car. It con-
sists of three rows of numbers that count the amount of tape that has
gone by the heads. In order to rapidly locate any given point on the
tape, the counter must have been set to 000 at the beginning of the.
tape, and the number of the desired location jotted down, perhaps with
a description of what is to be found at this point. Then the beginning
of the tape should again correspond to a setting of 000 and the tape
rapidly wound until the right number shows on the face of the counter.
Another way of finding a certain spot quickly is to place a tiny strip
of paper between the layers of tape at this spot as the tape is being
rewound.
Tape Speeds
One tape recorder will offer a variety of speeds. The speeds are
in inches per second. The higher the speed the better the fidelity,
but also the more tape is needed to record for the same length of time.
Varying situations and varying needs call for different speeds. When
| working in the researcher's native language where the interest is only
in content, 15/16 has the tremendous advantage that the tape will run
eight times as long as it would at the high fidelity speed of 7-1/2. On
the other hand the fidelity at this speed is wholly inadequate for
phonological work which in most cases would require 7-1/2 or faster.
Editing is another consideration. It is easier to edit a tape recorded
at 7-1/2 than one recorded at slower speeds. It is far better to sacri-
| fice the tape in field recording under almost every conceivable condi-
tion except that of tape shortage. It will be difficult enough to tran-
scribe the tape anyway, and every bit of fidelity will help make the
| job easier. In the interest of economy the Uher machine at 3-3/4 ips.
can still be expected to yield reasonable good quality for voice and
will probably be the speed most frequently used.
Recorder Inputs
. The tape recorder will have at least two inputs; one for high level
sources and the other for microphones (low level sources). When patch=
1 ing, use the high level input as described in the manual that comes with
L the recorder. The microphone input can be high impedance (5,000 - 50,000
} ohms) or low impedance (50 - 250 ohms). The microphone impedance should
) match the impedance of the input. A low impedance microphone and input
Th
will allow a longer microphone cable to be used, but due to the lower
voltage output requires 4 transformer to step it up. The recorder may
have a built-in transformer, or @ socket for plugging in an accessory
one. The high impedance microphone and input socket obviates the need
for a transformer, but necessitates a shorter lead cable. Above all,
when buying a microphone, make sure that the impedance matches or is
made to match that of the recorder input, in terms of high or low.
Recorder Outputs
There should be a separate output jack on the tape recorder built
for high impedance or for low impedance headphones. This can be used
for monitoring during recording as well as for playback if the recorder
has been wired accordingly, as has the Uher. The Uher output jack is
low impedance.
Tape
Tape consists of a thin jron oxide coating on a plastic base. |
Acetate tape has only economy to recommend it. Mylar is more expensive,
but is superior in almost every way including durability and humidity
resistance. The five-inch reel will accommodate up to 1800 feet of
the thinnest mylar (.5 mil) which works well with the Uher. Some ma-
chines are less delicate with the tape than is the Uher, and for these
1 or 1.5 mil tape is recommended. The more feet to the reel, the
longer the recording time without switching reels, but also the more
delicate the tape and the more likely is the problem of print-through
during storage (print-through being a pre-echo of louder passages that
can be heard during softer passages during playback).
Tape also comes as either regular or as high output. This refers
to the signal output potentiality without distortion during playback.
High output tape can play louder without distortion. This advantage
should be weighed against a higher cost, in deciding which to use.
There are several good brands of tape and a higher price usually cor-
responds to better and more consistent quality brands. Don't buy
acetate, and don't buy tape that is cheap or on sale. This writer
recommends Scotch 290 or BASF 1800° either of which should cost about
$4.25 per 5-inch reel when gotten at a discount.
It would be a good idea to bring several extra empty take-up reels
into the field. They provide a good way of siphoning off recordings for
filing, for making available special sections of tape, and make it pos-
sible to always go into a recording session with a completely empty
tape. Twenty or so of these reels would not be too many.
Microphones
The components of a tape recorder can be thought of as a chain.
The finished product is only as good as its weakest link. The weakest
link of most tape recorders is the microphone that comes with it. Even
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the Uher recorder comes equipped with an inadequately performing mike.
Microphone prices range from about $10 for a cheap crystal mike to about
$200 for a professional quality capacitor mike. The best bet for field
recording is a dynamic microphone costing from $50 to $100 (e.g. an RCA
BK12-A or an Electro-Voice 654A) of a lavalier type able to be hung
around the neck. ‘The ribbon microphone is a very responsive mike to
all of the hearable frequencies, but is not quite as durable as the
standard dynamic type. (The usual crystal mike is notoriously sen-
sitive to heat and humidity changes. Silica gel packing for the crystal
may help in this regard. The problem can be better avoided by using a
dynamic mike. )
Dynamic microphones come with varying degrees of directionality.
An omnidirectional mike is one that picks up sounds equally from any
direction. A directional microphone usually called ecardioid because
of its heart-shaped pickup pattern, will not pick up sounds from the
rear, and is relatively insensitive on the sides. Directionality in a
microphone allows the mike to be placed at a greater distance from the
subject while keeping background noise at a minimum. Any situation of
high background noise, such as outdoors, suggests the use of a direc-
tional mike. An omnidirectional mike can be used when background sound
is wanted, in a quiet situation, or if the mike is placed closer to the
subject. Stereo recording, for the best effect, necessitates cardioid
mikes. ‘The Shure 545L Unidyne III is an ideal cardioid mike for the
field. If only an omnidirectional mike is available, some amount of
directionality can be gained from using a rolled up magazine and aiming
at the sound source. Care must be taken not to scrape the mike with
the magazine or unwanted popping and other noise will be recorded.
Some directional mikes are now being sold that are so highly di-
rectional that whispers can be picked up a block away. These are
highly specialized, demanding close investigation before purchase.
If money allows, a good solution to the microphone problem is to
purchase more than one microphone including one omnidirectional mike
and one cardioid mike.
When recording is done outdoors, the microphone should have a wind-
sereen attached. A handkerchief can serve as a makeshift windscreen if
necessary.
When recording is done indoors and a lavalier mike is not used, a
stand is advisable. Placing a microphone directly on a table allows
the pickup of all kinds of unwanted vibrations and other sounds that can-
not be heard until the recording is played back. This is especially
true if the tape recorder is on the table also.
Mixer
When recording with more than one microphone a simple Y connection
is not really adequate unless the mikes are all the same make and model.
In order to blend the inputs of the microphones to achieve any desired
76
balance, a mixer is necessary. On stereo machines, of course, @ mixer
is only needed for more than two microphones.
Headphones
Because much time will be spent wearing headphones for listening
to and transcribing tape recordings, headphones must be comfortable
and must provide as good fidelity reproduction as possible. This can
be done for between $25 and $50 (the Koss SP-3X for $25 is an excellent
low impedance headphone that can be adapted for the Uher input with no
trouble and the SP-*SM by Koss is a good versatile Stereo/Mono headset).
Headphones are used for listening to recordings rather than the speakers
built into the recorder, because headphones can be padded against out-
side noise, because they do not disturb other people, and because of
the incomparable difference in fidelity. Headphones should be as light-
weight as possible, rugged, and nicely cushioned, in addition to the
high fidelity requirements.
Foot Controls
The Uher and many other tape recorders can be optionally supplied
with accessory foot controls for starting and stopping. This apparatus
is necessary for translation and transcription of tape recordings.
Batteri
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