Brainstorming (Resources)
Imagine there is a group of ambitious students named Amy, Betsy, and Carly. After looking through the past final projects individually, they met up to brainstorm ideas! Even after they got some inspiration, they were still stuck because they wanted to do something original.
Amy remembered the professor’s tip and said, “Well… why don’t we think about what kind of mistakes children make?”
Betsy said, “Um…what kind of speech mistakes do they make?”
Carly excitedly claimed, “That’s it Betsy! Why don’t we look into the use of ‘um’s? We adults use the disfluency ‘um’ whenever we’re thinking of what to say. But are the children using it for the same reasons as we do? It would be interesting to see if even children of young ages can pick up this linguistic habit.”
Intrigued by how interesting the question sounded, Amy emailed their TA right away for approval.
A minute later, the TA responded, “Sorry for a late response! I really like the focus of the question but how will you guys be able to test this question? Try to look into previous studies related to this topic and see how they tested it.”
Amy said, “Well, don’t we usually use ‘um’s when we are asked a question?”
Betsy said, “Um.. yeah!”
So the group met up the next day and started looking into research papers related to questioning and answering. In the Sumner et al.’s 2015 study(“Toddlers Always Get the Last Word: Recency biases in early verbal behavior”), they found that children are aware that they must answer questions when asked. As for Kidd et al.’s 2011 study(Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers’ referential intentions”), the group found that children use disfluencies when forming more complex responses, such as before an infrequent or new word.
From reading all this, Amy realized the disfluency ‘um’ is usually used as a filler when a more complex response than just “yes” or “no” is required. Therefore, the group decided to look into wh-questions, which are usually questions that require complex and thought-out response.
Operation & Analysis (Resources)
“Now that we learned how to use CLAN, how should we proceed with this? Carly? Didn’t you say you found CLAN easy?” asked Amy.
Carly said, “Hm.. well the easiest way would be for us to use combo command search for every use of ‘um’s and see what was said and asked before.”
“Brilliant!!!” Amy exclaimed, “Guys, I’m so happy. I can actually see us being able to do this.”
Carly said, “Well, we didn’t really start yet. It’s going to be a lot of work having to look into every use of ‘Um’. Why don’t we divide up the work by looking up the transcript of each child? I’ll do it on Alex, and one of you guys can do it on Violet, who’s the same age as Alex but is a different gender. We’ve learned to do command search on certain words and with combo command, we can look into 5 sentences before and after it’s appearance. The combo command would look like this(Carly enters in combo +t*CHI +sum -w5 +r5 +u *.cha)! The command ‘sum’ searches through a string, adding ‘w5’ lets us see lines before and after the utterance, and ‘r5’ lets us search for the actual utterances, as opposed to bracketed interpretations. Let’s make a Google Doc and put all the instances of “um” that are preceded by questions. After we finish that, let’s come back together and analyze what we found!”
Betsy said “That sounds like a good plan but I’m honestly still having a hard time using CLAN. Amy, do you think you can look into Violet, and I can make all the graphs since I’m excel master?”
Amy agreed since she had no idea how to use excel.
The group met up a couple of days after and was excited to talk about what they’ve found.
Amy said, “Well on the Google Doc, it looks like out of both children’s 321 instances of ‘um,’ there’s only 153 total instances when ‘um’ was in response to a question. Let’s look into the five lines before the 153 uses of ‘um’s and see if it is either used in response to a wh- or a yes/no question.”
Betsy asked, “When we count for wh-questions, do we only account for ‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘when,’ ‘where,’ ‘why,’ or ‘how’? or include question requiring more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response?”
“Good questions. Lets define wh-questions as any questions that require more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. And define yes/no questions as questions that require only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to answer.” responded Amy.
“Sounds good to me. Let’s all look into every instance and see what kind of questions they are asking. It would be cool to find a significant pattern to the questions they are asking too—maybe even something that a previous research paper can support.” said Carly.
Several hours passed and Amy noted, “In general, it seems that the mothers are asking questions pertaining to what the children are doing. Like, ‘What’s this one?’ or ‘Would you like to go to CVS?’”
“Yeah” Betsy responded, “Alex used ‘um’ 79 times after wh-questions and 17 times after yes/no questions. Violet used ‘um’ 46 times after wh-questions and 11 times after Yes/No questions. So in general, both Alex and Violet used ‘um’ about three times more after wh-questions than after Yes/No questions. You know what that means? These findings support our hypothesis that wh-questions require more complex responses than yes/no questions do. The complexity of the questions are more likely to cause children to produce ‘um’ disfluencies when formulating their answers. We have lots of instances of children often going on answering the mother’s questions after producing ‘um’ disfluencies.”
Carly, “Yay! I’m so glad we found evidence to support our hypothesis. But this is small scale data we are drawing conclusions from. Are there any other possibilities that could explain this?”
Amy responded, “That’s a really good point. Hm….Is it possible that wh-questions are in the mother’s input more often than yes/no questions? Like isn’t it much easier to form a question that yields more than just yes/no response? Maybe for the future directions of this study, we can look at all the questions the mother asked and look at all the responses to consider what proportion of all the wh- and yes/no questions asked yielded an ‘um’ response.”
Presentation(Resources)
“I think we found a lot of interesting information from this, and even an idea for future studies!” said Amy, “Now all we have to do is look at the Powerpoint Template and make our own. Betsy, since you’re good with the graphs and the visuals, can you make the powerpoint? After that we can divide up the powerpoint by each section and practice presenting. Do you guys remember how many minutes we have to present?”
Betsy responded, “Yeah of course! I think it was under 9 minutes…Isn’t that super short?”
Carly said, “Honestly, if we just leave out the minor details and only include the main points, I think 9 minutes will be enough. Why don’t we divide up the parts and practice keeping it under 8 minutes so in the actual event, we don’t have to worry about going over time. I know when I get nervous, I talk slower and use more filler words like ‘um’.” Amy said, “I agree. Let’s keep it under 8 minutes. As for the slides, I’ve looked into the powerpoint template and it seems pretty simple. For the first slide, we need to include the title and our names and on the second slide we need to include our research question as well as a related research paper that motivated us to form our hypothesis. The third slide is going to be our prediction on what data we’re going to get. For the fourth slide, since Carly and I did the combo searches, we will explain our methods and command. As for you Betsy, make the graphs of our data for the fifth and sixth slides. One of the graphs on the fifth slide should be divided into total uses of ‘um’s and how many of those are ‘um’s were produced after a question.
As for the data graph on the sixth slide, let’s only focus on the ‘um’s produced preceding questions and divide when it was used after wh-questions and when it was used after yes/no questions.
Then on the seventh slide, let’s include our conclusions as well as future directions of the study. Lastly, the powerpoint template said we also have to include references on the eighth slide but do we know what format it should be in?”
Betsy responded, “APA! I’m not only an excel master but also a citation master. I’ll do it.”
Carly exclaimed, “Awesome! Guys, I’m really happy that we’re almost done! It was fun doing this project with you guys.”
Betsy responded, “Well… not so fast. We still have a Final Report to write after presenting this.”
“Oh…” said Amy and Carly
Finished Products:
Group’s Final Report
Powerpoint
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