CEGS: An Elicitation Took Kit for Studies on Case Marking and its Acquisition Sonja Eisenbeiss University of Essex [email protected] Essex Research Reports in Linguistics Volume 60 Number 1 17 Jan, 2011 Dept. of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, UK, CO4 3SQ http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/publications/errl/ Essex Research Reports in Linguistics present ongoing research activities of the members of the Department of Language and Linguistics. The main purpose of these reports is to provide a quick publication outlet. They have ‘pre-publication status’, and most will subsequently appear in revised form as research articles in professional journals or in edited books. Copyright remains with the author(s) of the reports. Comments are welcome: please communicate directly with the authors. If you have technical problems downloading a paper, or for further information about these reports, please contact the editor: Doug Arnold: [email protected]. Citation Information: Sonja Eisenbeiss . ‘CEGS: An Elicitation Took Kit for Studies on Case Marking and its Acquisition’, Essex Research Reports in Linguistics, Vol. 60.1. Dept. of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, UK, Jan, 2011. http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/publications/errl/errl60-1.pdf CEGS: An Elicitation Took Kit for Studies on Case Marking and its Acquisition Sonja Eisenbeiss University of Essex Abstract This paper presents a set of Case Elicitation Games and Stimuli (CEGS). The aim of this elicitation tool kit is to encourage speakers to produce a broad range of case-marked forms in a variety of different syntactic contexts, including subjects, direct and indirect objects, prepositional phrases and noun phrases that are not selected by a verb or preposition. The games involve two tasks - the Puzzle Task and the Picture-Pairing Task (Eisenbeiss 2009, 2010). Both tasks are semi-structured and involve flexible procedures and an informal interactional setting. The same target words are used in different games and syntactic contexts, which allows for cross-context and cross-method comparisons. CEGS was designed to provide rich seminaturalistic speech samples of speakers from the age of two years. It can complement spontaneous speech sampling and controlled experiments on the use and comprehension of case marking; and the games are particularly effective for children that are too young to take part in controlled production experiments on case acquisition. The picture stimuli described in this paper were designed for studies involving German children, but we will discuss how tasks and stimuli can be adapted to other languages or adult participants, and to speech therapy or language documentation contexts. 1. Overview Studies on children’s acquisition of case marking employ a wide variety of methods (Behrens 2008, Blom and Unsworth 2010, Eisenbeiß 2006, 2009, Eisenbeiss et al. 1994, Menn and Bernstein Ratner 2000, McDaniel et al. 1996, Wei and Moyer 2008). The two most common of them are (i) controlled experiments with standardised procedures and stimulus materials and (ii) spontaneous speech sampling, where children are audio/video-recorded in everyday situations (e.g. free play, dinner conversation, picture book reading). However, experiments that require children to produce case-markers in controlled settings are often too challenging for children in the crucial stages of case-development, i.e. around the age of two to three years. At the same time, spontaneous speech samples often do not provide sufficient samples for each case context or for each case-marked form that the researcher wants to investigate (see Eisenbeiss 2003, 2009, Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 2 2010, Menn and Bernstein Ratner 2000, McDaniel et al. 1996). Semi-structured elicitation can address these problems and complement experiments and spontaneous speech sampling (see e,g. Eisenbeiss 2009, 2010, Eisenbeiss et al. 1994, Neokleous 2010, and elicitation tasks described in the field manuals of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/). Semi-structured elicitation tasks keep the communicative situation as natural as possible, but games, pictures, videos, etc. are employed to encourage the production of rich and comparable spoken speech samples. With adaptations of materials and tasks, such games can also be used (i) for diagnosis and treatment in speech therapy, (ii) in studies on multilingualism and second language learning, and (iii) in projects that document endangered languages (see e.g. Eisenbeiss 2006, 2009, 2010, Eisenbeiss and McGregor 1999, Neokleous 2010, http://fieldmanuals.mpi.nl/). In the following, I will present the Case Elicitation Games and Stimuli (CEGS), a set of tasks and picture stimuli for studies on case-marking. This elicitation tool kit was designed to encourage speakers to produce a broad range of case-marked forms in a variety of different contexts. It was initially developed for studies on the first language acquisition of German case, but modified versions of the tasks and stimuli involved were also used or piloted with children learning other languages and with adult second language learners (see e.g. Eisenbeiss and Matsuo 2005, Neokleous 2010). All of the tasks and stimuli described below were employed in the collection of the Eisenbeiss elicitation corpus, which was funded by the Max-Planck-Society and took place within the Acquisition Group of the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, headed by Prof. Wolfgang Klein. An overview of the entire Eisenbeiss elicitation corpus and meta-data for individual recordings can be found here: http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser/ MPI corpora > Acquisition > L1 Acquisition > S. Eisenbeiss > S. Eisenbeiss corpus 1. The CEGS comprises 13 games in total, four involving the Picture-Pairing Task and nine involving the so-called Puzzle Task. These two semi-structured elicitation tasks were developed on the basis of existing traditional games (Eisenbeiss 2009, 2010, Eisenbeiss et al. 2009). The picture stimuli for the elicitation tasks are designed to cover a broad range of case contexts and case-marked forms. Tab.1. gives an overview of the targeted case contexts. Tab.2 shows the target constructions and verbs for the individual games. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 3 Tab. 1: List of Elicited Case Contexts Case Context SUB Description nominative subject Der Mann gibt dem Bären den Honig(topf). ‘The man is giving the bear the honey(pot).’ NOM PRED predicative nominative Das ist ein/der Mann. noun phrase DO direct accusative object ACC Example PP accusative complement of a ‘That is a/the man.’ Der Mann gibt dem Bären den Honig(topf). ‘The man is giving the bear the honey (pot).’ … auf den Rücken. ‘…on the back’ preposition IO DO PP DAT indirect dative object Der Mann gibt dem Bären den Honig(topf). of a three-place verb ‘The man is giving the bear the honey (pot).’ dative object of a two-place verb ‘The honey tastes good to the bear.’ dative complement ...mit dem Helm. of a preposition EXT Der Honig schmeckt dem Bären. “extra” dative argument ‘…with the helmet’ Der Junge legt dem Pferd den Sattel auf den Rücken. The boy is putting the horse the saddle on the back ‘The boy is putting the saddle on the horse’s back’ Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 4 Tab.2: Overview of Semi-Structured Elicitation Tasks and Primary Elicitation Targets (see Tab.1 for Abbreviations) NOM Game Picturepairing Puzzle ACC DAT Construction / Verb Type Verb SUB PRED DO PP IO DO PP EXT two-place dative verb of possession gehören ‘belong’ + (+) two-place dative verb of experience schmecken ‘taste’ + (+) two-place dative verb of social interaction helfen ‘help’ + (+) + (+) two-place dative verb of social interaction winken ‘wave’ + (+) + two-place dative verb of possession gehören ‘belong’ + (+) + (+) two-place dative verb of experience schmecken ‘taste’ + (+) two-place dative verb of social interaction helfen ‘help’ + (+) + (+) two-place dative verb of social interaction winken ‘wave’ + (+) + (+) three-place verb geben ‘give’ + (+) + + (+) three-place verb zeigen ‘show’ + (+) + + (+) “extra” dative with SUB beissen ‘bite’ + (+) “extra” dative with SUB and ACC-DO waschen ‘wash’ + (+) + (+) + “extra” dative with SUB, legen ‘put’ + (+) + + (+) + + (+) (+) + (+) (+) + + (+) + (+) + and PP ACC-DO, and PP Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 5 As described below, the elicitation tasks are semi-structured; they target particular constructions or verbs, but also give children the freedom to produce other types of utterances. Brackets are used for case contexts that are not specifically targeted by the picture-materials, but tend to occur frequently in the course of the game, due to the nature of the elicitation task. In particular, all games start with an introductory phase in which children name all people, animals and objects involved in the game, using predicative constructions with a predicative nominative noun phrase, e.g. Das ist… ‘This is …’. Moreover, while they are describing the pictures on the puzzle pieces and cards, children occasionally say “the X on the picture/card/puzzle piece” or “the picture/card//puzzle piece with the X”, using a dative prepositional phrase. In the games with the verbs helfen ‘help’ and in the picture-pairing game for winken ‘wave’, the agents in the picture use various instruments to help or wave to others (see Fig 2. below). This encourages the use of prepositional phrases with the dative-assigning preposition mit ‘with’. Finally in the two games with the target verb schmecken ‘taste’, children frequently use the words mögen ‘like’ and (fr)essen ‘eat’, which require a nominative subject and a direct accusative object. While each game targets a particular verb, the games encourage children to produce sentences with other (similar) verbs as well. For instance, in the game with the target two-place dative verb gehören ‘belong’, children frequently use passsen ‘fit’, a two-place dative verb with similar argument structure and case-marking properties; and in the waschen ‘wash’ game, children also often use other verbs with similar argument structure and case-assignment properties (e.g. saubermachen ‘make clean’ or putzen ‘clean’). This combination of a primary target verb and construction with other production opportunities offers lexical and constructional variety for analyses of case-marking. Moreover, four two-place verbs and constructions are targeted by both the puzzle task and the picture-pairing task. This provides converging evidence from different tasks. Note that one cannot easily use the picture-pairing task for constructions with more than two arguments as this task is aimed at two-place constructions. For adults, a picture-triple version with one picture for each of the three argument noun phrases might be an option, but for young children this seemed too confusing The two tasks and the respective stimuli are presented in more detail below. In addition to targeting different case contexts, the CEGS tool kit also encourages children to use different genders as well as different types of case-marked forms. In the introduction phase, where the people, animals and objects depicted are described and labeled, children use Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 6 predominantly noun phrases with indefinite determiners. Later, they typically use personal pronouns or noun phrases with definite determiners. In addition, the tasks involving “extra” datives and dative verbs of possession encourage the use of possessive pronouns. The acquisition of case-marking on German nouns has not been studied in great detail so far – mainly because spontaneous speech samples only contain very few utterances with contexts for accusative and dative markers on nouns (see Eisenbeiss 2003, Eisenbeiss et al. 2005/6, Indefrey 2002, Stephany and Voeikova 2007 for overviews). Hence, the CEGS toolkit targets a variety of nouns that require the addition of–(e)n in dative plural contexts (e.g. SchuhNOM.SG vs. Schuh-ePL-nDAT ‘shoe’ vs. ‘shoes’, KindNOM.SG vs. Kind-erPL-nDAT ‘child’ vs. ‘children’; Igel NOM.SG vs. Igel-0PL-nDAT, ‘hedgehog’ vs. ‘hedgehogs’, Vogel NOM.SG vs. VögelPL-n DAT ‘bird’ vs. ‘birds’). The CEGS toolkit also targets several so-called weak masculine nouns that take –(e)n in accusative/dative.singular contexts (e.g. BärNOM.SG vs. ACC/DAT.SG Bär-en ‘bear’, JungeNOM.SG vs. ACC/DAT.SG Junge-n ‘boy’). In the picture-pairing games, card pairs with different colours are used; and in some games, animals of unusual colours (e.g. a red bear) or different sizes are contrasted. This encourages the use of case-marked adjectives. The CEGS toolkit was designed so that most nouns appear in more than one case context and in more than one game, allowing for cross-context and cross-method comparisons. This can be seen in the item-lists provided in Tab.3-11 below. For instance, the man, the woman and the baby or child appear as agents in various games eliciting two-place and three-place verbs and constructions and as dative arguments of the verbs gehören ‘belong’ and helfen ‘help’. Similarly, the games encourage children to use the nouns Katze ‘cat’, Bär ‘bear’ and Schaf ‘sheep’ as dative experiencers in the schmecken ‘taste’ puzzle and as dative indirect objects in the geben ‘give’ puzzle. Moreover, the cat is also the affected animal in the legen ‘put’ and the waschen ‘wash’ puzzle. Taken together, CEGS allows researchers to obtain a semi-naturalistic data set that covers a broad range of case-marked contexts and case-marked forms and allows us to compare (i) the same case-marked element in different contexts and (ii) different case-marked elements in the same context. Moreover, the combination of two games enables researchers to evaluate the effectiveness, validity and reliability of our elicitation tasks and to obtain converging evidence from different tasks. For earlier evaluations of semi-structured elicitation tasks see e.g. Eisenbeiss 2003, 2009. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 7 2. The Puzzle Task The puzzle task is a variant of so-called director-matcher or confederate description tasks (see Eisenbeiss 2010 for references and discussion). In the puzzle task, children see a puzzle with pictures in cut-outs; and they are encouraged to ask for puzzle pieces with corresponding pictures that they could put into the respective cut-outs (Eisenbeiss 2009, 2010, Eisenbeiss et al. 2009, Eisenbeiss and Matsuo 2005, Eisenbeiss et al. 2010, Neokleous 2010). The CEGS involves puzzles with 9 pictures that contrast minimally with respect to the participants involved. Hence, children must mention each of these participants to uniquely identify the picture. Fig.1 shows the puzzle board with the pictures for the target verb beissen ‘bite’. Fig. 1: The Puzzle Game for the Target Verb Beissen ‘Bite’ Children are first given the chance to look at the pictures on the puzzle board and discuss what they see. At this stage, the researcher introduces the target verb and points out the differences Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 8 with respect to the participants of the depicted events. However, the researcher does not model the target construction. For instance, for the puzzle shown in Fig.1, the researcher would say something like Bei diesen Bildern geht’s immer ums Beissen, aber du mußt immer ganz genau hinschauen. ‘These pictures are all about biting, but you have to look really carefully’. If children do not mention all relevant participants, the researcher will point to a picture where the action and one of the participants are identical and point out that something is different and that the child must really look closely at the picture to describe the right one. After children have seen all pictures, they can ask the researcher for the puzzle pieces, describing each piece they want. If children do not provide a full sentence with the target verb or do not attempt to produce the target construction, researchers ask for more information, for instance pointing out that they do not know where a particular animal was bitten. To keep the play situation as natural as possible and to minimize task effects, researchers do not follow a strict procedure. Children are allowed to ask questions, describe pictures more than once, discuss pictures or talk about other things. However, it is crucial to insist that (i) children name all event participants and (ii) describe each picture at least once using the appropriate verb. The people, animals and objects depicted on the puzzle pieces for the CEGS toolkit were selected so that for each argument type, children would have to use nouns of all three German genders. The only exception to this is the legen ‘put’ game, which involves a subject, an object, a prepositional argument and an “extra” dative argument. For this game, having gender variation for more than two event participants would have led to a larger picture set or to pictures that did not differ minimally from one another. Hence, for the nominative subject and the accusative prepositional phrase only masculine target nouns were selected. Masculine was chosen as this is the only gender with three distinct forms for nominative, accusative and dative. We did not include any pictures with groups of people, animals or objects to elicit plural forms. However, due to the nature of the contrasting picture sets, there are always several entities of the same type and children can talk about them when they discuss the similarities and differences between individual pictures. The target nouns for the 9 puzzle games listed in Tab.2 are presented in Tab.3-11. These tables provide gender information for each target noun and alternative nouns that children might use. So-called weak masculine nouns that take the accusative/dative singular marker –(e)n are underlined, while nouns that take –(e)n as a dative plural marker appear in bold face. Note that Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 9 feminine and neuter nouns never exhibit case affixes in accusative or dative singular and that weak masculine nouns take the plural ending -(e)n in all cases and hence do not show a distinct dative plural marker. Tab.3: Puzzle Stimuli for a Two-Place Dative Verb of Possession – gehören ‘belong’ Possessum Possessor NOM-SUB DAT-DO Masc. Schuh ‘shoe’ Mann ‘man’ Fem. Hose ‘trousers’ Frau ‘woman’ Neut. Laetzchen ‘bib’ Baby/Kind ‘baby/child’ Tab.4: Puzzle Stimuli for a Two-Place Dative Verb of Experience – schmecken ‘taste’ Stimulus Experiencer NOM-SUB DAT-DO Masc. Honig(topf) ‘honey (pot)’ Bär ‘bear’ Fem. Maus ‘mouse’ Katze ‘cat’ Neut. Gras ‘grass’ Schaf ‘sheep’ Tab.5: Puzzle Stimuli for a Two-Place Dative Verb of Social Interaction – helfen ‘help’ Agent Theme NOM-SUB DAT-DO Masc. Elefant ‘elephant’ Mann ‘man’ Fem. Giraffe ‘giraffe’ Frau ‘woman’ Neut. Känguruh ‘kangaroo’ Baby/Kind ‘baby/child’ Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 10 Tab.6: Puzzle Stimuli for a Two-Place Dative Verb of Social Interaction – winken ‘wave’ Agent Theme/Goal NOM-SUB DAT-DO Masc. Igel ‘hedgehog’ Fisch ‘fish’ Fem. Maus ‘mouse’ Schildkröte ‘tortouise’ Neut. Zebra ‘Zebra’ Nilpferd ‘hippo’ Tab.7: Puzzle Stimuli for a Three-Place Verb – geben ‘give’ Agent Theme Goal NOM-SUB ACC-DO DAT-IO Masc. Mann ‘man’ Honig(topf) ‘honey (pot)’ Bär ‘bear’ Fem. Frau ‘woman’ Maus ‘mouse’ Katze ‘cat’ Neut. Baby ‘baby’ Gras ‘grass’ Schaf ‘sheep’ Tab.8: Puzzle Stimuli for a Three-Place Verb – zeigen ‘show’ Agent Theme Goal/ NOM-SUB ACC-DO DAT-IO Masc. Mann ‘man’ grosser Pinguin ‘big penguin’ kleiner Pinguin ‘little penguin’ Fem. Frau ‘woman’ grosse Schnecke ‘big snail’ kleine Schnecke ‘little snail’ Neut. Mädchen ‘girl’ grosses Nilpferd ‘big hippo’ kleines Nilpferd ‘little hippo’ Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 11 Tab.9: Puzzle Stimuli for “Extra” Dative with Subject and Prepositional Phrase – beissen ‘bite’ Agent Beneficiary/Maleficiary Affected Bodypart NOM-SUB DAT-EXT (or: ACC-DO) ACC-PP Masc. Hund ‘dog’ Hase ‘hare’ Schwanz ‘tail’ (Fuß ‘foot’) Fem. Giraffe ‘giraffe’ Kuh ‘cow’ Pfote ‘paw’ Neut. Zebra ‘dog’ Känguruh ‘kangaroo’ Ohr ‘ear’ (Bein ‘leg’) Tab.10: Puzzle Stimuli for “Extra” Dative with Subject and Accusative Object – waschen ‘wash’ Agent Beneficiary/Maleficiary Affected Bodypart NOM-SUB DAT-EXT ACC-DO Masc. Mann ‘man’ Hund ‘dog’ Schwanz ‘tail’ (Fuß ‘foot’) Fem. Frau ‘woman’ Katze ‘cat’ Pfote ‘paw’ Neut. Mädchen ‘girl’ Känguruh ‘kangaroo’ Gesicht ‘face’ (Bein ‘leg’) Tab.11: Puzzle Stimuli for “Extra” Dative with Subject, Accusative Object, and Prepositional Phrase - legen ‘put’ Agent Affected Animal Body Part Moved Object NOM- DAT-EXT ACC-PP ACC-DO Junge Affe/Gorilla Rücken ‘back’, Kopf ‘head’, Sattel ‘saddle’, ‘boy’ ‘ape/gorilla’ Hals ‘neck’, Bauch ‘tummy’, Hut ‘hat’ SUB Masc. Schwanz, ‘tail’ Fem. - Katze ‘cat’ Leine ‘leash’ Neut. - Pferd ‘horse’ Halsband ‘collar’ Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 12 3. The Picture-Pairing Task In the picture-pairing task, two participants (two children or one child with the researcher) sit down with a set of picture cards that are lying face down. The participants take turns turning pairs of cards over. When the pictures on the uncovered cards match in colour and according to the world knowledge of the player, the player can keep the two matching cards and get another turn, until all cards are paired. See Fig.2 for some sample pictures for the target verb helfen ‘help’. Fig.2: Some Picture Pairs for the Target Verb helfen ‘help’ Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 13 In the traditional “Memory” version of this game, non-matching cards are turned over again and players have to memorise the position of cards that have already been turned around and might be a match for cards that are turned around at a later point. Procedures in the CEGS toolkit are flexible to keep task demands low. Here, children can leave the cards “face up”. Thus, the task can be played in different variants, adapted to the individual child’s attention level and memory capacity. However, all children are asked to produce utterances with the components shown on the pairs of cards they have turned over. For instance, the two cards for the target sentence The sheep is helping the hairdresser, show a hairdresser with a pair of scissors and a sheep with a pair of scissors. When the cards do not match, children are encouraged to produce a negated sentence with the same word; e.g. Die Kuh hilft dem Friseur nicht ‘The cow does not help the hairdresser’. As in the puzzle task, target verbs are introduced in infinitive form at the start of the play session; for instance Bei den Bildern hier geht es immer ums Helfen. ‘All of these pictures are about helping’. Later prompts follow a similar format and do not provide models of the target sentences. However, as the game is a two-player game, each child might hear the relevant constructions from the researcher or another child – though with another noun. Recall that each of the verbs that appears in the picture-pairing games of the CEGS toolkit is also targeted in a puzzle game, where no models are provided. Hence, the combination of the puzzle game and the picture-pairing game results allows us to compare results of the two games and to investigate whether and how children make use of such models. Initial results demonstrate that children do not simply imitate models, but produce non-target-like forms that reflect their linguistic knowledge even when models are provided. This suggests that the informal communicative setting helps to avoid strategy and imitation effects. As in the puzzle game, children can first familiarize themselves with the picture cards, which typically results in naming and descriptions with nominative predicative noun phrases or prepositional phrases. Tab.12-15 show the target nouns for the individual picture-pairing games. As for the puzzle task items in Tab.3-11, weak masculine nouns that take the accusative/dative singular marker – (e)n are underlined, while nouns that take –(e)n as a dative plural marker appear in bold face. Note that for the gehören ‘belong’ game in Tab.12, some additional items are used so that children do not see 9 pairs of pictures, but 11. This allowed us to include some “challenging” Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 14 items that some of children might know (Geweih, Schleife) and still ensure that all genders are covered by several items. Tab.12: Picture-Pairing Stimuli for a Two-Place Dative Verb of Possession – gehören ‘belong’ Possessum Possessor NOM-SUB DAT-DO Helm ‘helmet’ Masc. Mann/Motorradfahrer ‘man/motorbiker’ Masc. Fem. Neut. Hut ‘hat’ Fem. Hexe ‘witch’ Sattel ‘saddle’ Neut. Pferd ‘horse’ Leine ‘leash’ Masc. Hund ‘dog’ Kette ‘necklace’ Masc. Indianer ‘native American’ Krone ‘crown’ Fem. Prinzessin ‘princess’ Schleife ‘bow’ Neut. Mädchen ‘girl’ Geweih ‘set of antlers’ Masc. Hirsch ‘deer’ Gebiss ‘dentures’ Fem. Oma/Grossmutter ‘granny/grandmother’ Haus ‘house’ Fem. Schnecke ‘snail’ Lätzchen ‘bib’ Neut. Baby/Kind ‘baby/child’ Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 15 Tab.13: Picture-Pairing Stimuli for a Two-Place Dative Verb of Experience – schmecken ‘taste’ Stimulus Experiencer NOM-SUB DAT-DO Masc. Knochen ‘bone’ Masc. Hund ‘dog’ Käse ‘cheese’ Fem. Maus ‘mouse’ Apfel ‘apple’ Neut. Schwein ‘pig’ Banane ‘banana’ Masc. Affe/Chimpanse ‘ape/chimpanse’ Blume ‘flower’ Fem. Kuh ‘cow’ Möhre ‘carrot’ Neut. Pferd ‘horse’ Fleisch ‘meat’ Masc. Tiger ‘tiger’ Brot ‘bread’ Fem. Ente ‘duck’ Gras ‘grass’ Neut. Schaf ‘sheep’ Fem. Neut. Tab.14: Picture-Pairing Stimuli for a Two-Place Dative Verb of Social Interaction – helfen ‘help’ Agent Theme NOM-SUB DAT-DO Bär ‘bear’ Masc. Mann/Junge ‘man/boy’ Fem. Frau ‘woman’ Hund ‘dog’ Neut. Mädchen/Kind ‘girl/child’ Katze ‘cat’ Masc. Mann/Junge ‘man/boy’ Kuh’cow’ Fem. Frau ‘woman’ Schnecke ‘snail’ Neut. Mädchen/Kind ‘girl/child’ Schaf ‘sheep’ Masc. Mann/Friseur ‘man/hairdresser’ Pferd ‘horse’ Fem. Frau ‘woman’ Känguruh ‘kangaroo’ Neut. Mädchen/Kind ‘girl/child’ Masc. Affe ‘ape’ Fem. Neut. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 16 Tab.15: Picture-Pairing Stimuli for a Two-Place Dative Verb of Social Interaction – winken ‘wave’ Agent Theme Instrument NOM-SUB DAT-DO DAT-PP Masc. Mann/cook ‘man/cook’ Masc. Löffel ‘spoon’ Masc. Vogel ‘bird’ Fem. Oma ‘grandma’ Fem. Rose ‘rose’ Dinosaurier/ Drachen ‘dinosaur/ Neut. Baby/Kind ‘baby/child’ Neut. Fähnchen ‘flag’ Masc. Helm ‘helmet’ Bär ‘bear’ dragon’ Kuh’cow’ Masc. (Feuerwehr)Mann/ ‘(fire) man’ Fem. Neut. Biene ‘bee’ Fem. Prinzessin ‘princess’ Fem. Krone ‘crown’ Gans ‘goose’ Neut. Mädchen/Kind ‘girl/child’ Neut. Buch ‘book’ Känguruh ‘kangaroo’ Masc. Opa ‘granddad’ Masc. Stock ‘stick’ Schwein ‘pig’ Fem. Frau/ Tänzerin ‘woman/dancer’ Fem. Kette ‘necklace’ Huhn ‘chicken’ Neut. Gespenst ‘ghost’ Neut. Geschenk ‘present’ 4. Adaptations and Uses of the Case Elicitation Games and Stimuli (CEGS) So far, the tasks presented here have been used with children from 2-6 learning a variety of languages (see e.g. Eisenbeiss 2009, Eisenbeiss and Matsuo 2005, Neokleous 2010). However, initial piloting has shown that the picture-pairing task can be played with adults without major adaptations. For adults, who might find playing puzzles too childish, the puzzle task can be played as a slightly different type of director-matcher task (see Eisenbeiss 2009, 2010 for discussion of such tasks). The pictures are not placed on the puzzle board and the puzzle pieces. Rather, one can give one set of pictures to the speaker one wants to elicit data from, i.e. the target Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 17 speaker. A copy of the picture set is given to the researcher or a collaborator, who cannot see the target speaker’s picture set. The target speaker’s picture set has a different marker or a number on each picture. The task of the speaker is to describe which mark/number is on which picture so that the researcher/collaborator can place the appropriate markers/numbers in the correct positions on his/her own picture set. To make this more engaging and challenging, this game can be played with two speaker-researcher teams, each trying to finish first. In speech therapy contexts, the games and stimuli can either be used to obtain speech samples for assessment or they can be used to encourage the speaker to produce speech, with appropriate modeling and feedback. Researchers or speech therapists who are interested in collaborative or comparative projects can obtain the original pictures by getting in touch with the author: [email protected]. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Max Planck Society, Wolfgang Klein and the Technical Group at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen for their support in the development of the Eisenbeiss corpora and the stimuli presented here. I would especially like to thank those friends and colleagues who shared their knowledge of elicitation with me and were always willing to try out new games: Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown, Joana Cholin, Manfred Consten, Katrin Delhougne, Christine Dimroth, Birgit Hellwig, Frauke Hellwig, Bettina Landgraf, Friederike Luepke, Ayumi Matsuo, Bill McGregor, Bhuvana Narasimhan, Ambra Neri, Tom Roeper, Barbara Schmiedtová, Ingrid Sonnenstuhl, Mandana Seyfeddinipur. Katrin Delhougne and Ambra Neri deserve special thanks for their art work. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 18 References Behrens, H. (ed.). 2008. Corpora in Language Acquisition Research. History, Methods, Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Beverly, B.L. and Goodnoh, H. (2004). Assessing Grammatical Morpheme production using elicited sampling. (downloadable from: http://www.speechpathology.com/articles/article_detail.asp?article_id=225) Blom, E. and Unsworth, S. (eds.). 2010. 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Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 141-254. Neokleous, T. (2010). Clitic misplacement in L1A of Cypriot Greek: Implications for generative and usagebased accounts. Presented at the Linguists of Tomorrow, 1st International Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics, University of Cyprus, Cyprus. Stephany, U. and Voeikova, M. (eds.). 2007. Development of nominal inflection in first language acquisition: a cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: deGruyter. Tracy, R. 1986. The acquisition of case morphology in German. Linguistics 24:47-78. Wei, L. and Moyer, M.G. 2008. The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in Bilingualism and Multilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics