Student Project Involving Language Games

Sonja Eisenbeiss (University of Essex)

seisen@essex.ac.uk

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 studentsNouf Al-Harbi, Sean Gill, Carla Marciano

• Essex PhD-studentsShorouq 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

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

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

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.

Noun Phrases in German Child Language

(Eisenbeiss 1994, 2003) child

age files (w. elicit.) utterances

AND 2;1 1 1.4500

ANN 2;4-2;9 6 1.977

CAR 3;6 1 1.795

HAN 2;0-2;8 8 1.399

LEO 1;11-2;11 15 (all) 4.383 (4.383)

MAT 2;3-3;6 18 1.978

SVE 2;9-3;3 15 (10) 3.811 (2814)

total 1;11-3;6 64 (20) 16.793 (7.197)(Clahsen 1982, Wagner 1985, Clahsen et al. 1990)

Noun Phrases in Spontaneous Speech

Noun

phrase

with

context for

numbe

r

% of

utterances

correlation with

mean length of

utterance

article 2.646 28 0.489; sign.

adjective +

article

249 3 0.274; n.s.

possessive

‘s

19 <1 -0.097; n.s.

Verb Arguments with Contexts for Dative-marked

Articles

MLU

4.54.03.53.02.52.01.51.0

% a

ller

ana

lysi

erba

ren

Äuß

erun

gen

4

3

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1

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Korpus

sve

sve

mat

leo

han

han

car

ann

and

% o

f analy

sable

u

ttera

nce

s

black symbols: files with elicitation

MLU

4.54.03.53.02.52.01.51.0

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an

aly

sier

bar

en Ä

uß

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5

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KORPUS

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Noun Phrases with Possessive -s

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child

black symbols: files with elicitation

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.

Whose ballon is red? (Bevan, UG)

Whose balloon is red? (Bevan, UG)

Anna’s Daddy’s balloon (Koch, MA)

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

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)

Broad-Spectrum

• frog story: a picture book w/o words usedto elicit narratives (Berman/Slobin 1994)

• interview techniques

• re-telling of videos or stories

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)

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/

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/

The Co-Player Bag TaskThe 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.

Parent-Child Interactions (Bebbington, UG)

  Recording 1(Road Map

Carpet)

Recording 2(Bag Task)

Total

Child 165 188 353

Parent 259 365 624

The bag task produced richer language, but the patterns were the same as in other games, thus no “distortion”.

Deixis in Parent-Child Interaction (Bebbington, UG)

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).

The Picture-Pairing Task Combination Contrast

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

Puzzle Picture Materials: bite

Puzzle Picture Material: wash

Puzzle Picture Material: put on

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

Al-Houti (PhD-Project)

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“).

Games and Interactions: InputDo 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).

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).

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.

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

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.

English Variation Set

VERB OBJECT GOAL1 let’s put J’s bottles in the refrigerator2 want to put them in the refrigerator with me3 let’s put J’s bottles in the refrigerator4 we’ll put it in the refrigerator5 let’s put it in the refrigerator6 we’ll put it in the refrigerator7 you can put it in8 I’ll let you put it in yourself9 you put it right in10 you put it in there11 put it right in the refrigerator

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?

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.

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/