Chapter 3 Methodology
3.1 Data collection
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3.1 Data collection
This section presents how the researcher and the research team collected the speech data from the children and their families’ background information. The families participating in the research projects were recruited from an advertisement posted on a non-profit parent forum – Babyhome (http://www.babyhome.com.tw/).
On the forum, the research team posted the recruiting page, which listed the background of the research information and the age of recruiting children. Parents who would like to join in the research were supposed to fill a registration form out.
Sixteen children were enrolled under the projects.
According to children’s speech data and family backgrounds, some of the children in the MOST research projects lived with their grandparents who spoke Taiwanese Southern Min, so the children would produce Taiwanese Southern Min words during the observation. Besides, because some parents used to speak English to the children, the children might also produce English in the data. In order to rule out the influence of the languages (i.e. Taiwan Southern Min and English), this study excludes these children and focuses on the children acquiring Taiwan Mandarin. This study therefore collected four children and their caretakers. There were in a total number of 16515 tokens produced by four children and 4586 tokens produced by four caretakers, among which 8132 tokens were transcribed by the assistants in the
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research team and 12692 tokens were transcribed by the researcher.
3.1.1 Participants
The background of the four children, two girls and two boys, were selected and enrolled in this study. They were from middle class family in Taipei, Taiwan. The four children lived with their parents and their mothers took care of them in the day time.
They were the only child in their families during the observation. Their mothers used Taiwan Mandarin to communicate with them, so the children’s first languages were Taiwan Mandarin. The participants’ background information is presented in the following Table 3.1 and Table 3.2.
Table 3.1 Participants’ age range and recording duration
Participant Gender Age Range Recording Duration
Child #1 Female 1;0 – 2;5 18 months
Child #2 Female 0;10 – 2;3 18 months
Child #3 Male 1;1 – 2;6 18 months
Child #4 Male 0;11 – 2;4 18 months
The children’s ages were 0;10 to 1;1 at the beginning of the observation. The data in the boys’ and girls’ babbling stages were excluded in this study. The age when they were in non-reduplicated babbling stages and they had produced first meaningful words was selected. At the end of the observation, the their ages were 2;3 to 2;6.
Besides, they were reported to have no speech, hearing or visual impairments.
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Table 3.2 Participants’ gender and relation with children
Participant Gender Relation Language
Caretaker #1 Female Mother of child #1 Taiwan Mandarin Caretaker #2 Female Mother of child #2 Taiwan Mandarin Caretaker #3 Female Mother of child #3 Taiwan Mandarin Caretaker #4 Female Mother of child #4 Taiwan Mandarin Four adult participants were four children’s caretakers respectively. They were mothers and their native languages were Taiwan Mandarin. Each mother was the primary caretaker of the child during the whole longitudinal observation.
3.1.2 Procedures
The data collection of four children started from January 2012 to March 2014.
There were eight research assistants in the research team. Two assistants were sent to
a child’s house to record the spontaneous speech of the natural daily activities
between the child and the mother every other week. On average, a 60-minute
recording was made from every observation. Sometimes the recording time might be
shorter if the children were tired or cried and it might be longer if the children were
reading or playing with their mothers. In order to create a natural context, the
activities during recording were various, including share-book reading, object-naming,
or playing with toys, and the mothers were encouraged to play with their children. For
most of the time, the children played with the mothers and the mothers were the
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people the children were more familiar with. The choice of home environments as
observation settings was based on the studies of Lewedag, Oller and Lynch (1994)
and Chen and Kent (2005). Children were reported to vocalize more frequently and produced more well-formed syllables in home environments than in laboratory settings (Lewedag et al., 1994).
In order to collect the more natural speech data from children’s vocalization, no
systematic planning of elicitation was done during the recording, except for natural
elicitations in daily life. For instance, when the children were playing toys with their
mothers, sometimes the mothers would ask them to name the toys. Therefore, the
speech data of this study were ensure to be elicited from spontaneous conversations,
rather than elicited and planned sounds. The target words for analysis were selected in
these spontaneous speeches. Although the number and the type of children’s phonetic
errors might be greater than controlled experimental tasks, the data in a more natural
context reflected the processes of phonological acquisition. Thus, the researcher
selected these spontaneous speech data as analysis in this study.
During the observation, one of the assistants held the video recorder and the
other assistant held the sound recorder. The one who held the video recorder would
make sure to film the child’s face, mouth and the objects they played with. The
assistant who held the sound recorder had to get closer to the child in order to achieve
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good quality of speech sounds. At the end of every recording, the assistants would
note down every recording date and time, making it easier to file the recording data.
Before the research project, the participants have had signed the human subject
consent forms. At the end of the research project, the families would receive an album
of video recordings as a souvenir. Whole funds were supported by the MOST research
projects (MOST 100-2410-H-004-187-, MOST 101-2410-H-004-182-, and MOST 102-2410-H-004-107-).
3.1.3 Recording equipment
To achieve flexible recording, without distracting subjects, the wireless equipment of video-recording and sound-recording were used. Sony HDR-CX380 Handycam digital video camera recorder, Sony ICD-UX543F digital voice recorder and Shure SV100 multi-purpose microphone were all used during the recording. The microphone was used to connect the voice recorder. During the observation, the video-recorder and sound-recorder were powered with batteries instead of using cables, in order to provide more flexibility in choosing observation locations in the home environments. The size of the equipment was small, so assistants could carry the equipment easily while interacting with children.
In addition, the video helped us record children’s gestures, lip movements and
items they played with. It also provided us some clues to decode the referential
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meaning of children’s utterance. The sound-recorder offered us high quality sound
files. The multi-purpose microphone with the unidirectional pattern helped reduce
ambient noise and provided clear sound quality for spoken words. All recording equipment was used for providing high recording quality for perceptual transcription.