| Abstrakt: |
The article is based on the experience gained in the EEA and Norway Grants funded research project NF/R/2014/053 "Monolingual and bilingual acquisition of the Latvian language: tools, theories and usage" (LAMBA) which was carried out in 2009-2014 and dealt with researching 8 months to 6 years old Latvian speaking children's language. In the research of children's language particular attention was paid to the importance of the information provided by parents in checking the pronunciation of phonemes, as well as the importance of parental support during the adaptation and implementation process of the international survey (CD) and KATE UBiLEC adaptation and the implementation process. Analysis of definite experiences was done by creating and using children's speech tests and parents' surveys in Latvia from 1 March 2015 to 1 November 2016. The authors of the research conclude that parents' surveys are an important tool in language acquisition and the child's development studies. They can provide information about the child's linguistic environment and the influencing extralinguistic factors, both about the quality of the language of the child and their surrounding people (so also about the impact) and about the activity of the language use, communication skills, the impact of the dialect or other languages, as well as health status, etc., about the conditions that can influence the development of the language. The results of the parental survey can be used not only by linguists and teachers, but also by doctors, anthropologists, sociologists, researchers, etc. These surveys have a social role, too - as demonstrated in parents' statements, they encourage parents to pay more attention to how their child talks, to listen to them and find out the phonetic, lexical and grammatical nuances that in everyday communication have not seemed important. Parents have also acknowledged that having filled in the survey they have started paying more attention to their child's language skills. The usage of parental surveys also proved to have several drawbacks: • parental activity and willingness to devote time to fill in the survey, their confidence in the researchers, as this is the only way to get correct extralinguistic information, • restrictions of the data protection system, as researchers cannot use some surveys (e. g. KAT) without the participation of an intermediary - a national authority, which makes the research more expensive, • internet access and parents' digital literacy, • precision of parents' memory - the older the child whose speech facts are recorded, the more different language units the parent must remember, therefore, researchers have to face the fact that (a) not all the answers will be completely accurate, because parents do not remember whether the child really uses the form, (b) parents may consciously or unconsciously indicate a better or a worse level of the child's language skills, (c) parents do not respond to all the questions because they are not sure about the accuracy of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
