Describing the Experimental Investigation
Tomislava Bošnjak Botica, Jelena Kuvač Kraljević, Kristina Vujnović Malivuk · 2019
Ideally, all of the utterances that each child hears and produces should be recorded in order to be able to identify them, but in practice these recordings are virtually impossible to realize. In this chapter, the authors present an investigation based on the retelling of the story, which consists of asking an adult experimenter to read the text to each child individually and for the latter to retell the story immediately after hearing it. The authors propose that this experimental investigation simulates the natural situation in which the child acquires their mother tongue, due to two characteristics shared in the two situations: firstly, the source language of the context along with the language of the story are more complex than the language effectively produced by the children (at least up to a certain age), and secondly, the child consciously or unconsciously uses a reference model, whether it is the source text or the context language.