Contrast is the Name of the Game Contrast-Based Semi-Structured Elicitation Techniques for Studies on Children’s Language Acquisition

This paper discusses a series of so-called “elicitation” games that encourage children to talk in a situation that is as natural and relaxed as possible. Such games have played a central role in language teaching and speech therapy, where they have been employed to provide language training or to assess children’s linguistic development without putting them under stress. Recently, such games have become more widely used in language acquisition research. Here they are employed to obtain rich sets of language production data from children who are too young to take part in controlled experiments on language production. Moreover, they can be used in longitudinal studies where children are recorded over longer periods of time and might develop strategies in experiments. Most of these elicitation games target a specific construction or domain of grammar and so language teachers, speech therapists and researchers spend a lot of their time developing new games for each individual construction they would like to elicit from children. As this can be very time-consuming, there is a demand for games that can be adapted to a broad range of phenomena and situations (for instance, situations with one or several players). In this paper, I will present three such games, which might be useful for acquisition researchers, language teachers and speech therapists: the Bag Task, the Picture-Pairing Task and the Puzzle Task. In addition, I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using such games in a research context.