The two fields of child language research

Abstract

It is clear that child language research (CLR) is a field of considerable disunity, in terms of theory as well as practice, but especially as regards practice. This paper argues that a major source of inconsistency in CLR at the level of data and method is the diverse disciplinary back grounds of its practitioners. The disciplinary orientation of the senior authors of over 150 published research reports in ten different journals between 1970 and 1985 was used as an independent variable in the examination of various methodological practices. Specifically, one can observe a division between linguists and those trained in the humanities on the one hand, and psychologists and those trained in the social sciences on the other hand. Both groups contribute to CLR, but their contributions differ, sometimes radically, in the domain of in quiry, in the methods employed to collect, preserve, and analyse data, and even in the presentation of results.