nqn20120829-01 DVO: Ruscien and Mary

Family problems (DVO) picture task, a structured task for gathering enriched language data for descriptive, comparative, and documentary purposes, focusing on the domain of social cognition. The task involves collaborative narrative problem-solving and retelling by a pair or small group of language speakers, and was developed as an aid to investigating grammatical categories relevant to social cognition. The pictures set up a dramatic story in which participants can feel empathetic involvement with the characters, and trace individual motivations, mental and physical states, and points of view. The data-gathering task allows different cultural groups to imbue the pictures with their own experiences, concerns, and conventions, and stimulates the spontaneous use of previously under-recorded linguistic structures. We ar-gue that stimulus-based elicitation tasks that are designed to stimulate a range of speech types (descriptions, dialogic interactions, narrative) within the single task contribute quan-titatively and qualitatively to language documentation, and provide an important means of gathering spontaneous but broadly parallel, and thus comparable, linguistic data. For more information, read the article here: scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.e… Speakers: Ruscien Aniba and Mary Dibod. Ruscien is recorded with the AKG C520 head-mounted mic with the Zoom H4N. Mary's audio is captured with the onboard Zoom microphone. Keywords: Elicitation; Family Problems