Research Methods in Language Acquisition Principles, Procedures, and Practices

Synthesizing decades of collective experience into a set of practical guidelines for students and budding researchers, the authors of this book introduce a systematic approach to generating, processing, and interpreting reliable and valid speech data. They review a variety of observational and experimental tasks that allow researchers to collect natural speech, elicit specific types of speech, and assess language comprehension.

Guidelines for generating data sets by transcribing and coding raw speech data are also reviewed, as are special considerations for working with infants and multilingual children.

María Blume, PhD, is an associate professor in linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She received her PhD in linguistics at Cornell University.
 
Her research interests include first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, cognition, and the acquisition of morphology and syntax and their interaction with pragmatics.
 
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.
 
She recently coauthored a book published by Cambridge University Press: Bilingualism in the Spanish-Speaking World: Linguistic and Cognitive Perspectives (Austin, Blume, & Sánchez, 2015).
 
Barbara C. Lust, PhD, is a professor of developmental psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science at Cornell University, where she has taught for more than 30 years.
 
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 20 languages. Together they have constructed a range of materials for the crosslinguistic interdisciplinary study of language acquisition.
 
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.
 
In addition to numerous journal and book articles, she has authored Child Language: Acquisition and Growth (2006; new edition in preparation). With Claire Foley, she coedited Language Acquisition: The Essential Readings (2004). With María Blume, she codirected the development of an international cyberinfrastructure-based project to support research and teaching in an interdisciplinary framework, "Transforming the Primary Research Process Through Cybertool Dissemination: An Implementation of a Virtual Center for the Study of Language Acquisition" (NSF CI-0753415).