An elicitation toolkit for analysis of children's speech

My PhD research examined the acquisition and use of sociphonetic variation in the speech of primary school-aged children in Australian English. In the early stages of my research, I realised that the existing methodological tools and approaches, such as the Map Task, or traditional sociolinguistic interview materials, were probably not suitable for young children. To meet this need, I designed and developed an age appropriate elicitation toolkit involving structured and semi-structured tasks that are suitable for all levels of literacy and age groups.

The tasks include:

• A Map Task-like game,
• A question card task,
• A picture identification task.

These tasks, along with a period of unstructured casual speech between participants, aimed to not only collect speech on a continuum of styles, but also collect examples of specific phonetic and phonological variables that are socially important, particulary in an Australian English context.

The design of the toolkit makes it suitable for use to examine variation not only in Australian English, but many other Englishes, and for investigations of discourse analysis, phonological acqusition, and gesture analysis if video recordings are taken.

The materials for the toolkit and task instructions and information will soon be available for download at the project’s Open Science Framework page.