ELICITATION

TECHNIQUES
BY:ARJUN
MOUNIKA
PREM SAGAR
VENEELA V
An elicitation technique is any of a number of data collecting,
techniques used in
anthropology, cognitive science, counselling, education,
knowledge engineering, linguistics, management, philosophy, psychology
or other fields to gather knowledge or information from people.

Elicitation, in which knowledge is sought directly from

human beings, is usually distinguished from indirect methods such as
gathering information from written sources.
TYPES:
[I N G E N E RA L]

• Interviews
• Brain Storming
• Focus Groups
• Exploratory Prototypes
• User Task Analysis
• Observation
• Surveys
• Questionnaire
• Story Board
A person who interacts with human subjects in order to elicit information
from them may be called an elicitor, an analyst, experimenter, or knowledge
engineer, depending on the field of study.

Elicitation techniques include interviews, observation of either naturally

occurring behaviour (including as part of participant observation) or
behaviour in a laboratory setting, or the analysis of assigned tasks.
INTRODUCTION

• There are many ways of collecting data, and elicitation is just one of them. Elicitation itself can
take several forms.

• Why do elicitation?
elicitation of various types is a very useful way of getting data quickly
ex:: after preliminary work, you will still be working through those texts with a native
speaker of the language and asking questions about them.
This is also a type of elicitation.
• First elicitation of sentences:
lexical items in isolation so that you can work out the phonemic system of the
language.
moving from individual lexical items or your very simple carrier phrases to slightly
more complex phrases fairly quickly .
• Where to start:
Start with a simple sentence and elicit other sentences that differ minimally from it
It’s important to vary a single item at a time.
The next stage is to try and generalize what you know to words that you
don’t know.
• The cat is chasing the mouse.
• The cat is chasing the mice.
• The cats are chasing mice.
• One cat is chasing two mice.
• The cat is eating the mouse.
• The mouse died.
• How would I say climb?
• <Answer>
• Can I say <the cat is climbing the tree?>
• <Answer>
• Could you say it for me?
principles of elicitation:
you obtain sample data, form a hypothesis, test it with more data, refine your hypothesis, and use
the hypothesis to make predictions about how previously unrecorded sentences will be formed.
• Another area to explore elicitation easily:
basic elements of a noun phrase.
• a cat
• this cat
• that cat
• two cats
• these cats
• my cat
• my cats
• my five cats
.
SUMMARY:

early elicitation should concentrate on basic sentence structure.

be able to make up some sentences of your own and test them and back translate your
sentences.
Redundancy:
Never build an analysis on just a few sentences
Ask the same questions of different people
• Working on multiple topics:
as a tool for getting vocabulary :: Hale (2001)
for expanding vocabulary, acquiring a wide range of language structures in a short space of time.
Go through your notes at the end of each day:
When to stop eliciting:
Don’t keep collecting words for months. Start moving on to sentences within a few hours of elicitation time,
Not worrying about transcription issues.
ELICITATION TECHNIQUES IN FIELD -LINGUISTICS:

• 1.Translation of sentences into the target language

ex: ‘How do you say want to eat dinner?’

• 2.Back-translating sentences you or other consultants have made up

ex: What does Ben de kitap okuyup durdum mean?2

• 3.Manipulating data (changing one word in a sentence, or changing the order of items, to see how that
changes the structure)
ex: I’ve got a sentence Ben de kitap okuyup durdum. What would Ben de kitabı okuyup durdum mean?
• . 4.Asking for grammaticality judgements
ex:: Is this a good sentence? Guls¸at kitap okuyup durdum
5.Asking questions about sentences already elicited, or from texts
ex: I’ve got a sentence Guls¸at kitabı okuyup durdum that’s not
grammatical. What should we change to make it a good sentence?

6. Using stimulus tools, ex: such as pictures or videos

7.Semi-structured interviewing
ex: conducting conversations in the target language to elicit certain
words, types of construction, or discourse strategies Ethical reasoning
tasks and problem solving are useful for this.

8. Creating Questionnaires
1.TRANSLATION

• common method of elicitation

• Start with simple sentences, and be specific
ex: Start with simple noun phrases (consisting of a single noun) and a verb in the present tense
• Write or type the sentences in advance and leave gaps to write the answer
• Allow enough space for inter-linearizing your answer
2.GRAMMATICALITY JUDGMENTS AND
NEGATIVE DATA
• Grammaticality judgments and negative data is important
• have to explain what you mean by ungrammaticality.
• Consultants might not be clear on the difference between prescriptive and descriptive errors,
• most people are not quite so interested in the arbitrary relationship between form and
meaning as linguists are, be careful using these sorts of sentences for elicitation.
• If you are not sure about the response
‘would a fluent speaker of the language ever say this?
• Occasionally say things you know are wrong to check on this
3.QUESTIONNAIRES

• method of data collection is very good if you need a standard data set
• to make the answers maximally useful
• provide instructions
• don’t make the questionnaire too long
• your respondents to record their answers aloud, either on a recorder or through computer
software
• The question might be something like
‘what is the behaviour of basic verbal agreement in this language?’

• This general question can be broken down into a lot of sub-questions:

Does the language have verb agreement?
For all persons/numbers?
With which arguments?
How is it realized?
If there is multiple agreement, do the markers interact?
Is agreement affected by tense, mood, or transitivity?
Are there verb classes/conjugations?
Does word order affect agreement?
Is agreement ever optional?
Therefore don’t make the questionnaire too long; it should not take
longer than 45 minutes to fill out.

Questionnaires do not have to be done

 by pencil and paper (or even by computer text).

You could ask your respondents to record their answers aloud, either on
a recorder or through computer software
(there is language-learning software which will allow you to give ‘tests’
where the ‘student’ can record audio answers to written or spoken
questions).
DATA MANIPULATION
• good way to get data quickly is to take sentences you already have and manipulate them

• Turn sentences into questions (and vice versa).

• Manipulate voice and valency possibilities; e.g., active – passive/anti passive.
• Manipulate the tense of the verb. Ask for a sentence in the present,
• then get the same thing in past and future (or other categories the language has).
• Negative polarity – ask for a sentence, then get the same sentence in the negative.
• Manipulate the number of participants (e.g. singulars for plurals and vice versa).
CONTROLLED CREATIVE TASKS

• consultant to be creative
• also directed toward the acquisition of particular data
• work best when you have some familiarity with the language and can respond.
Ex: language games
• also make up short texts to elicit certain grammatical constructions.
USE OF STIMULUS PROMPTS
• use stimuli, such as pictures or videos
• Make sure you have a way of recording which responses were given for which prompts.
if your time is limited and the language is endangered it might be very odd to record stories
about small American boys rather than traditional stories belonging to the culture you are
studying.
constructing an unknown story from a set of pictures and retelling a well-known story from
memory are quite different tasks. Ex: “The frog stories”
another issue: expected behaviour
If you are using a computer to deliver the stimulus: show them what it does, and get them used
to how it works.
POTENTIAL PROBLEMS
• Translation problems
• The gavagai problem and semantics
• Mistranscription
• Language problems
• Multilingualism
• Boredom and tiredness
• Question formation
• Wrong type of data
• Helpful’ comments