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Part of
Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In honor of Stephen Crain
Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, Yi-ching Su and Aijun Huang
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 60] 2017
► pp. 13–39

Chapter 1
The Truth Value Judgment Task

An update

| Macquarie University and ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition & its Disorders

Thirty years have passed since the dynamic Truth Value Judgment Task was invented (Crain & McKee 1985). The methodology was created to test children’s knowledge of constraints and to test whether or not children could access both meanings associated with ambiguous sentences. The task is widely used today in its original format as detailed in Crain and Thornton (1998) but it has also been adapted to solve new issues and to meet the demands of cross-linguistic data. This paper reviews the task and discusses extensions. The extensions accommodate contexts of uncertainty, felicity judgments, and include an adaptation called the Question/Statement task designed to address special linguistic properties of Mandarin Chinese.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief history of time – Before the Truth Value Judgment task
  • 3.The Crain and McKee (1985) study
  • 4.Methodological considerations
    • 4.1Further design features
    • 4.2The accessibility of Yes and No responses
    • 4.3Avoiding Type 1 errors
    • 4.4Reminders and rewards
  • 5.Interim summary
  • 6.Extensions to the TVJ task
    • 6.1Contexts of uncertainty
    • 6.2The felicity judgment task
    • 6.3The question/statement task
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.60.02tho
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Crain, Stephen & Rosalind Thornton
2021. Universal Grammar and Language Acquisition. In A Companion to Chomsky, ► pp. 348 ff. DOI logo
Thornton, Rosalind
2021. Judgments of Acceptability, Truth, and Felicity in Child Language. In The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax, ► pp. 394 ff. DOI logo

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