ABSTRACT
In studying children’s speech, there are limits on what can be learned solely through the study of the child’s spontaneous productions. What a child says may not be an adequate or accurate representation of what he or she knows; extrapolating control over linguistic forms from spontaneous language may over-, under-or misrepresent the degree to which a child has mastered a particular linguistic skill. Thus, to appraise the depth of children’s linguistic knowledge, researchers often resort to tasks that prompt the child to process novel structures, whether they be lexical, morphological, or syntactic. Berko’s (1958) elicited production paradigm was a classic first approach to this problem: By requiring children to manipulate nonsense words, she could elicit generative expression of morphological and morphophonemic knowledge.
