Research Methods in Language Acquisition - Blume, Maria

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Résumé :
Language acquisition research is challenging?the intricate behavioral and cognitive foundations of speech are difficult to measure objectively. The audible components of speech, however, are quantifiable and thus provide crucial data. This practical guide synthesizes the authors' decades of experience into a comprehensive set of tools that will allow students and early career researchers in the field to design and conduct rigorous studies that produce reliable and valid speech data and interpretations. The authors thoroughly review specific techniques for obtaining qualitative and quantitative speech data, including how to tailor the testing environments for optimal results. They explore observational tasks for collecting natural speech and experimental tasks for eliciting specific types of speech. Language comprehension tasks are also reviewed so researchers can study participants' interpretations of speech and conceptualizations of grammar. Most tasks are oriented towards children, but special considerations for infants are also reviewed, as well as multilingual children. Chapters also provide strategies for transcribing and coding raw speech data into reliable data sets that can be scientifically analyzed. Furthermore, they investigate the intricacies of interpretation so that researchers can make empirically sound inferences from their data and avoid common pitfalls that can lead to unscientific conclusions.

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