Student Project Involving Language Games

1. Student Project Involving Language Games Sonja Eisenbeiss (University of Essex) seisen@essex.ac.uk

2. Students Involved in Previous Projects • Essex undergraduate (UG) final year projects (LG831): Michael Bebbington, Wendy Bevan, Hannah Siseman, Rachel Swabey, Katherine Youngs • Essex postgraduate (PG) MA students Nouf Al-Harbi, Sean Gill, Carla Marciano • Essex PhD-students Shorouq Al-Houti • Work placement students from other universities • Nicola Koch, University of Stuttgart, Germany • Ariane Klein, Janina Fickel, Susanne Klaus, Sarah Schmid, University of Konstanz • Christoph Aurnhammer, University of Passau • Postgraduate and PhD-students from our partner university JNU, New Delhi, India Benu Parek, Pori Saikia

3. Overview • Collecting data for acquisition studies • Investigating interactions and the use of language in different games to evaluate the effectiveness of game materials • Investigating the use of games for language interventions

4. Collecting Data for Acquisition Studies • Eisenbeiss: PhD about German children’s noun phrase structure and inflection • Al-Houti: PhD about agreement inflection in noun and verb phrases in Kuwaiti Arabic • Bevan: UG dissertation (LG831) about possessive constructions in English child language • Koch: MA about possessive constructions in German child language • Bebbington: UG project about demonstratives and deixis (here/there, this/that) • Al-Harbi: PG assignment (LG699) about code-switching and MA-project about demonstratives and adjectives in Saudi Arabic children’s speech and their input, comparing games • Parek: PhD project about case marking in Hindi child language • Saikia: Mphil project about classifiers in Assamese child language

5. Why do we Need Games for Data Collection? • Many interesting things happen in language development around the second birthday. • At this age, children cannot cope with the strict procedures and tasks involved in language production experiments. • If we only record them in naturalistic settings, we often do not get enough data for our analysis and we do not give them the chance to “show off” their linguistic abilities.

6. Noun Phrases in German Child Language(Eisenbeiss 1994, 2003) (Clahsen 1982, Wagner 1985, Clahsen et al. 1990)

7. Noun Phrases in Spontaneous Speech

8. Verb Arguments with Contexts for Dative-marked Articles % of analysable utterances black symbols: files with elicitation

9. Noun Phrases with Possessive -s child % of analysable utterances black symbols: files with elicitation

10. Interactional Setting • Director/matcher (or “confederate description”):A “director” describes a scene/object etc. and a “matcher” who is not able to see this scene/object, has to recreate it.E.g.: the director has a red dot/balloon on a particular part of a and has to tell the other person where to place theirs. • Speaker/Listener: A speaker provides information for someone without access to this information. E.g.: The speaker retells a story (s)he heard/read while the listener was not in the room. • Co-Players:All participants are involved in a game and provide each other with information to co-ordinate their actions. E.g.: The players are involved in a construction or puzzle game where not everyone has access to all pieces.

11. Whose ballon is red? (Bevan, UG)

12. Whose balloon is red? (Bevan, UG)

13. Anna’s Daddy’s balloon (Koch, MA)

14. Tom’s mother’s father’s balloon (Koch, MA)

15. Target Type • broad-spectrum (generally encouraging participants to speak) • form-focused: the use of a particular form or construction • meaning-focused: the linguistic encoding of a particular function or meaning (which can be encoded in different ways)

16. Broad-Spectrum • frog story: a picture book w/o words usedto elicit narratives (Berman/Slobin 1994) • interview techniques • re-telling of videos or stories

17. Form-focused • picture-matching game: aimed at noun phrases with adjectives in different case contexts (Eisenbeiss 1994) • possession-matching-games: aimed at noun phrases with possessive markers, e.g. Anna’s balloon (Eisenbeiss 1994)

18. Meaning-focused • “circle of dirt”: a picture book w/owords used to elicit descriptions of part-whole relationships and actions affecting (body) parts (Eisenbeiss and McGregor 1999) https://www.academia.edu/198798/The_Circle_of_Dirt • “cut-and-break”: video stimulus created for cross-linguistic studies of “separation and material destruction” events (Bohnemeyer, Bowerman and Brown 2001) http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/

19. The Bag Task • a bag with blocks and toys (e.g. Lego animals) of different sizes and colours. The bag has pockets that match the toys in colour and have coloured buttons, ties, etc.; and children frequently refer to colours, sizes and locations when they ask other players to help them hide or find animals in the pockets • alternative: sets of small bags that are not attached as pockets to a big bag, but can be carried in a big bag (requires fewer skills and allows for a more flexible use of different bags) • https://languagegamesforall.wordpress.com/examples-of-games/bag-game/

20. The Co-Player Bag Task The game involves a bag with pockets of different styles, colours and sizes for toys of different sizes and colours. Children refer to colours, sizes and locations when they ask others to help them hide or find toys in the pockets.

21. Parent-Child Interactions (Bebbington, UG) The bag task produced richer language, but the patterns were the same as in other games, thus no “distortion”.

22. Deixis in Parent-Child Interaction (Bebbington, UG)

23. The Picture-Pairing Task • Children have to find pairs of matching pictures • Similar to “memory”, but the pictures are not identical, but matched • Memory load can be reduced by visible pictures • Variants • contrast-oriented: the child has to describe what is on the two pictures and to say whether they match (e.g. small green bananas vs. large yellow bananas) • combination-oriented: the child is asked to form an utterance with components that are depicted on the matching pictures (e.g. the sheep is helping the hairdresser).

24. The Picture-Pairing Task Combination Contrast

25. The Puzzle Task • a task with co-players: child describes contrasting pictures on a puzzle board, adult finds the matching pieces, child puts them into the correct cut-out • exchangeable pictures and puzzle pieces • used as a form-based or as a meaning-based game • puzzle data analysis: A. Klein, J.Fickel, S.Klaus, S.Schmid, C.Aurnhammer

26. Puzzle Picture Materials: bite

27. Puzzle Picture Material: wash

28. Puzzle Picture Material: put on

29. Getting them to Talk, not Point • Whoever starts pointing looses a point (sticker, etc.) • Give them something to hold: • a two-handled very deep drawstring bag with the rewards for the puppets: explain that you need help handing out rewards as the bag is so deep that you cannot pull out rewards easily; and explain that pouring them out will get the puppets fighting over them • a magnetic fishing rod that they can use to place items in the game

30. Al-Houti (PhD-Project)

31. Some Core Results • At the age of 2;0, children may still use some formulaic language. • However, they also show productive use of language. • They may produce errors (e.g. This is mine‘s or getting the gender wrong for some nouns or using singular forms instead of plural forms). • However, the errors they make are not random, but often involve rules of the language (e.g. adding possessive –s). • They also show that they know the defaults of their language (e.g. Overgeneralising singular forms to plural contexts but not vice versa, overgeneralising the default object case accusative to German verbs that require specfic dative markers (e.g. helfen „help“).

32. Games and Interactions: Input Do parents provide richer input to children when they play certain games (even without explicit training)? • more utterances per unit of time • more varied lexical choices • more contrasts between forms (e.g. car/cars) • more repetitions • more complex constructions (e.g. using modifiers like adjectives or prepositional phrases Siseman, Youngs (UG): initial comparisons of different games demonstrated that the type of games affects the use of language (e.g. noun-focused vs. verb-focused games).

33. Games and Interactions: Children In Al-Harbi's comparison between the Bag Game with Lego animals and a free Lego game, children playing the Bag Game showed more engagement during the play session and higher rates of complex noun phrases (e.g. with adjectives).

34. Marciano and Gill (MA): Contrasts • Variants of the game and puzzle task, parent-child interactions without explicit instructions about adjectives and modifiers, just minimal instructions, e.g. about the use of velcro on the bags and pockets. • Some sets of toys (e.g. 4 zebras) did not invovle contrasts, while others did (e.g. tiger family with small/big tigers). • Findings: • Contrasting items showed more use of adjectives or modifiers than non-contrasting ones. • Parents and children can get into a "habit" of using modifiers, even when they are not required, using more at the end of the game.

35. Language Support Games • Feedback: • positive re-inforcement • explicit corrections, but this can be demotivating and does not involve presentation of correct forms • expansions, rephrasing:daddy car -> Yes, that is daddy‘s car • Modeling: • frequent repetion of words/phrases in isolation • repetition and variation: variation sets

36. Models: Variation Sets Variation sets are series of adult utterances with a common theme and a constant intention, but variation in form: • adding or deleting a word or phrase, • replacing one word with another, • changing the word order, etc.

37. English Variation Set VERBOBJECTGOAL 1 let’s putJ’s bottlesin the refrigerator 2 want to putthemin the refrigeratorwith me 3 let’s putJ’s bottlesin the refrigerator 4 we’ll putitin the refrigerator 5 let’s putitin the refrigerator 6 we’ll putitin the refrigerator 7 you can putitin 8 I’ll let you putitinyourself 9 you putitright in 10 you putitin there 11 putitright in the refrigerator

38. Variation Sets Support Learning • Variation sets provide clues about the target language: • adding or deleting a word or phrase • => which elements can be omitted? • replacing one word with another • => which types of elements fulfill similar functions? • changing the word order, etc. • => which word order variations are possible?

39. Language in Games in Interventions • In her UG dissertation, Rachel Swabey showed how language games could be used to support language development in a child with down syndrome. • For this case study, she carried out pre- and post-tests for basic concepts (e.g. same/different) and provided rich input in the form of variation sets for one set of concepts that was shown to be problematic for the child. • This case study suggests that the use of variation sets was effective, but further studies with more children are required to evaluate this claim.

40. Planning your own Project • Come to the language Games Club • Sign up for final year UG projects if you are an UG student • Use our resources: • https://languagegamesforall.wordpress.com/ • https://www.pinterest.com/sonjaeisenbeiss/ • https://essex.academia.edu/SonjaEisenbeiss • http://childdirectedspeech.wordpress.com/ • ttp://experimentalfieldlinguistics.wordpress.com/