106

Selting. Margret. Auer. Peter. Barden. Birgit. Berg­

mann. Jorg. Couper-Kuhlen. Elizabeth. Gunthner.

Su>anne. Meier. Chflstoph. QuastholT. Uta, Schlo­binski, Peter & Uhmann, Susanne (1998). Ge­

sprachsanalytisches Transknptionssystem (GAT).

Unglllstische Berichte, J73, 91 - J 22.

Svartvik, Jan (Ed.) (1990). The London-Lund cor­pus or spoken En~lish: Description and researchLund: Lund l 'niversity Press.

7. Ethnographic Methods

I Introduclilln1 Cross-cultur,,1 psychology:l. From the cross-cultural to the cross­

Iinpustic "IUJy of language acquisition~. Developmental pragmatics ;IOJ language

socialization research5. Cognitive anthropology6. References

I. Introduction

In the very first paragraph of his introductionto the first volume of his "Volkerpsychologie"Wilhelm Wundt expresses his hope that futurepsychologists will hecome more aware of theimportance of "Volkerpsychologie" as an in­dispensible source for psychological episte­mology (" ... Zll hoffen ist [... ] daB sich diePS) chologen der Bedeutung der Volker­psychologie als einer unentbehrlichen Er­kenntnisquelle mehr bewuf3t werden als diesgegen ....artig der rail ist" (Wundt. 1900 vi))And two paragraphs later he states his con­viction that linguistics is more and moreheading tow;lrds becoming thoroughly ab­sorbed ill the psychological aspect of linguis­tic prl)~lems ("lnnerhalb der Jahre hatsich mir die Uberzeugung aufgedrangt,dal3 die Sprachwissenschaft von sich aus inwachsendem Mal3 eincr grlindlichen \'ertie­fung in die psychologische Seite der Sprach­probleme mgefiihrt werde" (Wundt. 1900:viii». As to this latter conviction, Wundt wasright. However. - for various reasons (Oelze.1991) - his hopes with respect to the influ­ence of his "VolkerpsychoI0gie" remdinedunfulfilled for a lung time, Ethnographer~

and anthropologists as well as linguists andpsychologists largely ignored this work - asthey ignored related ideas of other pioneers

II. Methoden der Psycholinguistik

Svartvik, Jan & Qulrk. Randolph (1980). A corpusof English conversation. Lund: Gleerup,

Whitney, Paul (1998). The psychology of language.Boston: Houghton Miffiin.

Sabine KowalTechnische Universi/ii/ Berlin (Deu/schland)

Daniel C. O'ConnellGeorge/own l'niversi/y, Washing/on (USA)

in the cross-cultural study of language andcognition (Berry & Dasen, 1974: 2 - 12;Klineberg. 198U: Lonner & Triandis. 1980:TrommsdorfT. 1977). The founder of modernculturJI anthropology. Bronislaw Malinow­ski (1922, 1923), who studied with Wundt inLeipzig, was certainly influenced by his em­piricism, but he rather took up psychoana­lytic debates (Senft, 1999; Firth, 1957). How­eva, Malinowski. who introduced the "par­ticipant observer" method into the field ofethnography (1922: 24 f.), also made an earlyplea for researching the socialization and thelanguage acquisition of children in non­European cultures (Malinowski, 1923: 318 ff.;Goodwin, 1997). That language, culture andcognition were finally understood as interde­pendent domains of one interdiscipline againwas an achievement that accompanied therise of psycholinguistics and the developmentof the "cross-cultural psychology" subdiscip­line. Representatives of this subdiscipline ­mainly followers of lean Piaget's and BarbelInhelder\ Geneve school (1966), Gustav la­hoda (t 984), some of Jerome Bruner's (1983)associates at the Center of Cognitive Studiesat Harvard University such as PatriciaGreenfield (1989). and Michael Cole (1974.1977. 1982), Sylvia Scribner (1977) and theircoworkers took the interdependence betweenlanguage, culture and cognition for granted.They were convinced that psychologicalhypotheses - especially hypotheses in devel­opmental psychology - proposed in re­searching popuJations within one culture andone language community could only claim tobe general and universal if they were testedin intercultural research. In psycholinguisticsthe interest in this new interdiscipline wasmade manifest probably most prominently

7. Ethnographic Methods

with the "Field Manual for cross-culturalstudy of the acquisition of communicativecompetence" edited by Dan Slobin and writ­ten by Susan Ervin-Tripp, John Gumperz,Dan Slobin, Keith Kernan, Claudia Mitchelland Brian Stross. Although the manual existsin xeroxcopied versions only, it started thefield of "The Crosslinguistic Study of Lan­guage Acquisition" (SJobin, 1985a,b; 1992;1997a,b) for which Malinowski made such astrong plea. Studies in this new field in devel­opmental psycholinguistics favoured and stilluse the comparative method - the methodWundt propagated so much (Oelze, 1991: 34,59). Cross cultural psychologists, researchersof developmental pragmatics and languagesocialization. anthropological linguists andcognitive anthropologists have been dealingwith psycholinguistic issues, too. They havealso taken up some of the basic ideas ofWundt and Malinowski in developing theirmethods for data gathering. In what followsthe ethnographic methods developed withinthese various sub-disciplines are briefly pre­sented and discussed. These methods are ofrelevance for psycholinguistics in general be­cause they add the cross-linguistic and cross­cultural perspective in the study of languageand cognition and shed some light on thequestion of how the human language capac­ity copes with the huge variety of natural lan­guages.

2. Cross-cultural psychology

"Psychology elaborated in our environment,which is characterized by a certain cultureand a certain language, remains essentiallyconjectural as long as the necessary cross-cul­tural material has not been gathered as a con­trol" (Piaget, 1974: 309). With this program­matic statement Piaget - who developed histheory of the child's cognitive developmentby researching children in Geneva only - em­phasized the need for cross-cultural studies inpsychology. Some of his students like PierreDasen (1974) started in the late I960s to testhis predictions with respect to the sequentialorder of specific stages in the development ofknowledge. Carrying out Piaget's experi­ments and tests in other European and non­European cultures they found that thesestages do occur in the same order. but not atthe same ages, and that systematic culturaldifferences appear in the rate of development(Berry, Dasen & Witkin, 1982). The psychol-

107

ogists used Piaget's classic experimental de­signs, materials and tests -, like the Piaget(Pennanent) Object Scale, the tasks of 'com­binations' and 'pennutations', verbal logicaltests, classification and seriation tasks, tasksto test spatial concepts like orders, rotationand horizontality and tasks to test the con­cepts of conservation of quantity, weight,volume and length - sometimes in slightlymodified versions, together with more or lessstandardized paper-and-pencil tests and in­terviews (Dasen, 1974).

To allow for the cross-cultural comparisonof their results researchers must ensure notonly the functional equivalence of the com­pared behavior settings, but also the concep­tual equivalence of the meaning their re­search instrument> have for the comparedgroups and the metric equivalence of the re­sults, the data, of compansons (seeTrommsdorff, 1977: 243 IT). Thi~ is the gene­ral problem for all ethnographic methods ap­plied in the cognitive sciences. There is nosuch thing as a "culture-free (or culture-fair)test", Thus, the major problem of cross-cul­tural comparative research is "ascertainingthe culture-specific (emic) and cross-cultural(eticj validity" at the same time (Tromms­dorff, 1977: 245). In other words. the prob­lem is "how to describe behaviour in tennswhich are meaningful to members of a partic­ular culture (an ernie approach ... j while atthe same time to validly compare behaviourin that culture with behaviour in another orall other cultures (the elic aim ... )" (Berry &Dasen, 1974: 17). Moreover, field researchjust cannot be compared to a laboratory set­ting: it is extremely difficult, if not impos­sible, to control independent variables in thefield, "one must usually sacrifice some gene­ralizahility to gain control, or sacrifice somecontrol to gain generalizability" (Berry &Dasen, 1974: 20).

Although researchers in the Geneva tradi­tion were completely aware of these method­ological problems (Segall, Dasen & Berry etal.. J990: 48ff.), American cross-culturalpsychologists like Michael Cole and his asso­ciates (1971,1974,1977,1982) criticized theirapproach within the Piagetian tradition. FurCole it is a general mistake to transfer a psy­chological cognitive theory which originatedwithin a Western cultural tradition to non­Western cultures, because this entails the riskof experimental ethnocentricism. Comparingresults of various psychological experimentswith observations of people's everyday beha-

108

vior often reveals that "people who have dif­ficulty with a particular task in the labora­tory may spontaneously use the sk.ill of inter­est in their everyday activities" (Rogoff, Gau­vain & Ellis, 1984: 539). Thus, instead of keep­ing the tests, tasks and experiments constantin different cultures Cole and others proposeto alter the tasks and expriments until theyare culturally appropriate (see also Green­field, Brazelton & Childs, 1989). Believing inthe psychic unity of mankind, they "situatethe psychological experiment as one of manycontexts in which to sample behavior. Thisapproach to "behavior in context" leads[them] to question the generality of inferencesfrom experiments that are not corroboratedby non-experimental data" (Cole & Scribner.1982: 4; but see also Berry, Dasen & Witkin,1982: 19). Consequently, they understandtheir cross-cultural psychological approachas "experimental anthropology" or "unor­thodox ethnography" (Lonner & Triandis,1980: 8; see also Schlegel, 1994) and investi­gate cognitive skills embedded in culturalcontexts. Cole and his associates illustratethis approach and methodology in their fa­mous study of the KpelJe of Liberia whichresearches the influence of schooling and li­teracy on Kpelle ways of thinking (Cole,Gay & Glick et aI., 1971). They first studiedthe classification of natural world-objects inthe Kpelle noun system in order to relate thelinguistic categories of the speech communityto other verbal and non-verbal behaviors.They interviewed their consultants with thebasic question "(name of object) is a what?",discussed the answers in groups, and summa­rized their findings in a chart. Then they in­troduced the "sentence-substitution method":The consultants had to make up sentenceswith words within this chart and were thenasked which other words could be used inthis sentence. Then the psychologists did afree-association experiment, in which theyasked their consultants questions like "Whatdo you think of when I say (name of an ob­ject)?". Finally the consultants were con­fronted with a number of sorting tasks. Theelicited data revealed that semantic classesserve as one means of organizing verbal be­havior, that the KpeUe use taxonomic classrelationship to structure their verbal beha­vior, but that the use of this kind of structur­ing is neither universal nor obligatory for thesituations that were studied. To find outwhether such organization affect the way inwhich subjects learn something new, the re-

II. Methoden der Psycbolinguistik

searchers made the subjects perform experi­ments that use the concept-discriminationtechnique and they did free-recall memoryexperiments in various situations andcontexts. To study the interrelationship be­tween culture, logic and thinking the psychol­ogists analyzed a Kpelle court case, strategiesin playing the famous Malan game, and re­sponses to verbal syllogisms (see alsoScribner, 1977), riddles, and to solving prob­lems with respect to conjunctive and disjunc­tive concepts. The ideas of the general ap­proach of "experimental anthropology", themethods developed and used, and the in­sights gained are described in detail in Cole,Gay and Glick et al. (1971) and in Cole andScribner (l974).

3. From the cross-cultural to thecross-linguistic study of languageacquistion

Confronted with Chomsky's (1965) notion of"Universal Grammar" and his idea of an in­nate "Language Acquisition Device" Ameri­can psycholinguists understood the impor­tance of collecting language acquisition datafrom non-Indo-European languages to revealdevelopmental universals and language-spe­cific developmental patterns (see Siobin,1985; Bowerman, 1981). At the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley Dan Slobin, in collab­oration with linguists and anthropologists(see Chapter I above), started to developmethods for the "collection of comparablecross-linguistic and cross-cultural data on theacquisition of communicative competence"(Slobin, 1967: ix). The scientists produced a"Field Manual" consisting of a general intro­duction, three main parts and five appendi­ces. The manual "presented an admirableeclectic view of the range of phenomena thatshould be studied, a summary of existing re­search techniques, and specific suggestionsfor the conduct of cross-cultural research onlanguage development" (Bowerman, 1981:95). Part I presents 14 major research tasksfor recording and eliciting speech data ofchildren in various situations over a periodof 12 months of field research. These datahad to cover information on the children'smotor development, their linguistic develop­ment with respect to phonology, vocabulary,and grammar, their communicative develop­ment and insights in the community's linguis­tic belief system. A core sample of 24 children

7. Ethnographic Methods

between the ages of six months and 13 years,their mothers and some other adults in thespeech comunity served as subjects for thestudies. Part II presents methodologicalfactors - basically a list of important issuesto keep in mind with respect to the aims ofthe planned contrastive analyses, to the re­cording apparatus and techniques, and to na­tive consultants, assistants and interpreters.Part III presents some theoretical considera­tions and possible subsidiary studies with re­spect to phonology, grammar, semantics, thesocial setting of linguistic behavior, and us­age and styles. Five appendices contain ex­amples of specific tests and procedures likemodel sentences for elicited imitations, com­prehension tests, elicitation techniques, thetranscription of tapes, techniques for study­ing multilingualism (e. g., a picture vocabu­lary test, a word association test, etc.), an agecalculation chart, the International PhoneticAlphabet, and relevant references to languageacqusition studies. 12 dissertations on the ac­qusition of various languages emerged fromthis manual (Slobin, 1985: 4 f.). However,they illustrate once more the methodologicalproblem of cross-cultural research: The "re­searchers encountered a number of unantici­pated difficulties in following the research de­sign in the field situation. Experiments couldnot be successfully administered and carriedout because this type of activity was cultur­ally inappropriate in the societies understudy. Researchers found, moreover, that thespeech samples they recorded could be col­lected only in what they admitted were cul­turally inappropriate situations" (Scb.ielTelin,1979b: 75; see also Bowerman, 1981: 107lT.;Berry, 1980: 7). Realizing that "differenttypes of languages pose different types ofacquisition problems" (Slobin, 1985: 4)Siobin, "attending to the acquisition of lin­guistic form itself' (Slobin, 1990: 233), devel­oped a "cross-linguistic" approach. "This ap­proach is based on the empirical finding ...that patterns of grammatical developmentare strikingly similar in widely dilTering cul­tural settings; and on the psychological con­viction that the course of language develop­ment is determined by biological and cogni­tive factors that are common to our species.Thus [Slobin has] made use of linguistic di­versity as a kind of "natural experiment" inwhich the world presents children with dif­ferent tasks to solve. In this laboratory ... onecan tease out the strategies that children usein constructing grammar" (Slobin, 1990:

109

233). The results of this approach are docu­mented in the by now five volumes edited bySlobin and titled "The crosslinguistic studyof language acquisition". Contributors tothese volumes are "asked to approach [their]particular language "as a case study in a po­tential crosslinguistic typology of acquisi­tional problems", considering those datawhich "contribute to an issue of general theo­retical concern in developmental psycholin­guistics" (Slobin, 1985: 18). All authors fol­low the framework with the guiding ques­tions presented in Slobin (1985: 19 f.). More­over, Dan Slobin, in collaboration with RuthBerman, initiated a crosslinguistic develop­mental study on different ways of relatingevents in narrative. To get a "better under­standing of the complex of linguistic, cogni­tive and communicative abilities that underliethe human ability to capture and conveyevents in words" (Berman & Siobin, 1994: ix)the psycholinguists elicited narratives in 3-,4-, 5-, and 9-year old children and in adultsin five languages (English, German, Spanish,Hebrew, and Turkish) with Mercer Mayer's(1969) storybook without words titled "Frog,where are you". The "frog story" - first usedby Bamberg (1985) - consists of 24 picturesthat form a story accessible to children. Thedata elicited with this booklet are analyzedwith respect to "the 'filtering' of experiencethrough language for purposes of speaking;... the 'packaging' of event descriptions intolarger units for purposes of narrating; and ..the cognitive and psycholinguistic develop­ment that leads to mature 'ftltering' and'packaging'" (Berman & Slobin, 1994: 9). Inthe meantime many other researchers elicitedand analyzed data with the "frog story" andthe sample of crosslinguistic data and re­search results on how events are related ver­bally is continuously growing. Parallel toSiobin's cross-linguistic approach as an alter­native to the cross-cultural approach propa­gated in the 1967 "Field Manual", ElinorOchs and Bambi SchilTelin developed a moreholistic way "to deal with the various aspectsof the development of communicative com­petence and language socialization in a uni­fied manner". They refer to their approach as"Developmental Pragmatics" and "LanguageSocialization Research" (Ochs & Schieffelin,1979; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Before dis­cussing this approach, it remains to be notedthat there are also a few cross-languagestud.ies of speech perception (see e. g.

110

Strange, 1995); they have to cope with similarmethodological problems as the cross-lin­guistic studies of language acquisition.

4. Developmental pragmatics andlanguage socialization research

Their criticism of the studies based on the"Field Manual" (Slobin, 1967), the insightthat "all societies do not rely on the verysame set of language socializing procedures"(Ochs, 1986: 6), and the realization that"acquisition of language and acquisition ofculture are natural contexts for each otherand should be studied as such" (Schieffelin,1979a: 14) motivated Ochs and Schieffelin todevelop a new paradigm for the study of lan­guage and culture development: Developmen­tal pragmatics "tends to focus on children'scompetence in constructing discourse ... Therelevant features of context utilized in devel­opmental pragmatic research ... include priorand subsequent discourse ... , and interlocu­tor's understanding of social identities, know­ledge and goals ... These features are linked tospecific linguistic structures in order to assesschildren's functional competence in language.Language socialization builds on this rich un­derstanding of children's discourse at the mi­croanalytic level... language socializationhas as a goal the linking of microanalyticanalyses of children's discourse to more gene­ral ethnographic accounts of cultural beliefsand practices of the families, social groups,or communites into which children are social­ized" (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986: 168). Tostudy how the acquisition of language and ofculture influence each other, the linguists ex­amined how language is used in the re­searched speech communities "to express re­lationships and cultural meanings in interac­tions involving children and adults" (Schief­felin & Ochs, 1986: 183). Influenced byGeertz's concept of "thick descriptions"(Geertz, 1973: 6), they developed thefollowing methods for data collection and fortranscription: Schieffelin (l979a) did all herwork with Kaluli children in Papua NewGuinea monolingually. For a year she sys­tematically studied three 2- to 3-year olds inthree situations within their families in whichthe children regularly participated, and shemade additional observations in other inter­actional contexts. She thus tape-recordedspontaneous, naturalistic interactions be­tween these children and their mothers, sib-

II. Metboden del' Psycholinguistik

lings, relatives and other villagers. Whiletape-recording she also took detailedcontextual notes on the situation, the partici­pants, nonverbal behaviour, etc. in her diary(see also BraunwaJd & Brislin, 1979). Withthe assistence of the children's mothers shethen transcribed and translated the tapes, in­tegrating these contextual notes into the tran­scription. A few months later she listened tothe tapes and checked the transcription withanother consultant. His comments were usedto further enrich and extend the informationprovided by the mothers. These transcrip­tions with their "thick descriptions" formedthe basis for her anthropological linguisticanalyses. Ochs (1988) did a similar study onSamoa. She researched six 1'/,- to 3-year oldchildren for several months, but she alsostudied children in classroom settings and didan adult-speech study. In gathering her datashe used tape- and video-recorders, fieldnotes, and photographs. All material gath­ered was then transformed into complex andextremely rich transcriptions (Ochs, 1979)that contextualized both ethnographic andlinguistic information. On the basis of thesetranscriptions the researchers' data analysesshowed that "conversational activities in­volving small children vary in ways that sys­tematically relate to cultural beliefs, values,and social order. [... J What a child says andhow he or she says it will be influenced bylocal cultural processes" (Schieffelin & Ochs,1986: 183).

5. Cognitive anthropology

In the late 1950s and early 1960s cultural,psychological, and linguistic anthropologistsin America redefined their object of research:"A society's culture consists of whatever it isone has to know or believe in order to oper­ate in a manner acceptable to its members[... J Culture does not exist of things, people,behavior, or emotions, but in the forms oforganizations of the things in the mind of thepeople" (Goodenough, 1957: I67f.). Withthis definition of 'culture' as 'cognition' thefounders of what was first called the "NewEthnography", then "Ethnoscience", later"Ethnosemantics" and finally "CognitiveAnthropology" (from here onwards abbrevi­ated as CA) established a new interdisciplinethat tries to "study the cultures of othersfrom the inside" (Casson, 1994: 61), thusavoiding ethnocentric biases in its investiga-

7. Ethnographic Methods

tions. Under the influence of anthropologicallinguistics and the linguistic relativity hy­pothesis (Lucy, 1997) the "real thrust of eth­noscience has been the realm of semantics"(Keesing, 1972: 306). The pioneers of CAfirst studied certain semantic domains like,e. g., kinship. The terms found for such a do­main within a language constitute a "folkclassification". This classification is describedwith a so-called "componential analysis" inwhich the meaning of the tenns is representedthrough a set of semantic oppositions (Du­ranti, 1997: 108 ff.). Other studies researchedtaxonomies that represent, e. g., folk botani­cal and zoological knowledge in various cul­tures. By the 1970s these classification studieswere criticized as "far too simplistic" (Kees­ing, 1972: 314). However, influenced byChomsky's (1965) ideas of a universal gram­mar, a new focus of interest on "the interfacebetween cultural knowledge and basic psy­chological factors developed within CA"(Casson, 1994: 66). This new focus is mani­fested in Berlin and Kay's (1969) comparativestudy on "Basic Color Terms" that claims to"reveal universal constraints of patterning"in a semantic domain" which had previouslybeen thought to be randomly structured"(Duranti, 1997: 115). In this study the re­searchers use the Munsell set of 320 colorchips, present them to consultants and askthem to provide the basic color term for eachchip. Despite the importance Berlin andKay's 1969 study and subsequent work hadfor CA, their approach was heavily criticizedby researchers that argued from a more rela­tivist position and criticized the methodologyof data gathering: "Color terms in a givenculture do not mean Munsell chips" (Du­ranti, 1997: 161; see also Senft, 1987; Saun­ders & van Brakel, 1997). And indeed, morerecent research in CA deals with conceptualcategories and semantic domains from amore relativist point of view again (see Cas­son, 1994; Dougherty, 1985; Quinn & Hol­land 1987). The remainder of this sectionpresents one of these projects within modernCA, namely the domain-centered approachand the methods of the former "CognitiveAnthropology Research Group" now the de­partment of "Language and Cognition" ofthe Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguis­tics in Nijmegen. The aim of this group ofresearchers with its director Stephen Levin­son is to further research into the relation­ships between language, cuture and cognitionby conducting fieldwork on leading issues of

111

common interest to anthropology, psychol­ogy and linguistics in a number of non-Indo­European languages and cultures. (Levinson,1996; Pederson, Danziger, Wilkins et aI.,1998; Senft, 1995). The group tries to investi­gate questions of possible interdependenciesbetween language, culture and cognition em­pirically via the following stratagem: "(a)first, pick a conceptual domain; (b) second,find two or more languages which contrast inthe semantic treatment of that domain (i. e.,where very different semantic parameters areemployed); (c) third, develop non-linguistictasks which will behaviourally reveal the con­ceptual parameters utilized to solve them; (d)compare the linguistic and non-linguistic rep­resentation systems as revealed by (b) and(c), and assess whether there is any correla­tion between linguistic and non-linguisticcodings in the same domain" (Brown & Lev­inson, 1993: 1). The first domain the grouphas been picking is the domain of "space".To research this domain the group developedmethods to build a comparative data basethrough parallel field research in differentlanguages and cultures. In developing thesemethods the group accepted that "the best al­ternative to the true experiment is unques­tionably an appropriate quasi-experimentaldesign" (Brown & Sechrest, 1980: 316). Mostof the developed methods make use of 'inter­active games' (Cole, 1977: 470) which areused to elicit task-oriented verbal descrip­tions in native speakers of the language un­der study. These games involve a 'director'consultant who is allowed to see a certainstimulus, and a 'matcher' who is not. Theplayers are sitting side by side with a screenseparating them so that they cannot see eachother's stimuli. The orientation of the playersis taken note of, and the lield researcher in­structs the players what to do in their ownlanguage - all instructions are standardized.Moreover, the field researcher encourages theplayers to interact verbally, especially if theythink they have difficulties to understandeach other. On the basis of the verbal descrip­tions given by the 'director' in the game, the'matcher' is asked to reproduce three-dimen­sional models involving familiar objects withintrinsic orientations, like a human statuettein various body poses and mini-landscapesinhabited by model farm animals, as well asunfamiliar and abstract objects. Some gamesalso involve the matching of photographs onthe basis of verbal descriptions; these pho­tographs systematically cover certain spatial

112

oppositions. Thus, the "photo-object-game",for example, is played with tbree-dimensionalplastic toys and photos depicting a certainspatial configuration of these toys. The direc­tor describes the pboto, and on the basis ofthis description tbe matcher uses the toys torearrange the spatial configuration. The"wooden-man-game" requires that the direc­tor, on the basis of photos or on the basis ofa wooden human statuette with flexible an­gles, describes certain body-poses. Thematcher has to adjust his or her statuette insuch a way that the resulting body posematches the description. In the ''Tinkertoy­games" (see Cole, 1977: 469) the matcher ­with the help of a building system for chil­dren - has to build a number of three-dimen­sional configurational and non-configura­tional constructions on the basis of the direc­tor's description which itself is based eitheron the same object or on a photo of the ob­ject to be constructed. The "photo-photo­game" consists of four series of 2 X 12 pho­tographs; here the matcher has to select onephoto on the basis of the director's descrip­tion. The photos depict certain localizationsand configurations of objects with and with­out intrinsic features (like men vs. trees andballs) in four directions on the horizontalplane. Moreover, the set contains a numberof distractor photos, so it did not become tooobvious for the players to hypothesize aboutwhat we were after with the game. These fourgames were designed to elicit descriptions ofspatial arrays and configurations. Withgames like these corpora of contextuaJly an­chored yet complex interactive texts wereelicited that incorporate many examples ofspatial language. These corpora constitutethe group's comparative data base for the re­search on verbal reference to space in dif­ferent languages and cultures (see Senft,1994, 200 I). Analyses of these data revealedfundamental differences in bow tbe re­searched languages refer to space. Speakersof Indo-European languages prefer the use ofbody coordinates to describe arrangementsof objects, but other languages like, e. g., tbeAustralian Aboriginal language Guugu Yi­midhirr (Haviland, 1993) prefer systems an­chored as cardinal direction terms (see alsoSenft, 1997). The group then investigated"whether variation in linguistic use corre­sponded to variation in cognition.To do thisthe group has exploited the sensitivity of thevarious spatial reference systems to rotation.If something is to the left and I turn around,

II. Methoden der Psycholinguistik

it is now to the right, but if I conceive of itas to the east, then turn around, it remainsto tbe east" (Lucy, 1997: 301). Using anumber of such tasks (Senft, 1994: 421 ff.,200 I: 527 fl'.) the group found that "speakersof different languages respond in ways con­gruent witb their verbal practices" (Lucy,1997: 30 I). Thus, languages - probably to­gether witb otber cultural phenomena - seemto influence the choice and the kind of con­ceptual parameters their speakers use to solvenon-verbal problems within tbe domain"space". It seems that studies like the onepresented here finaJly contribute to makingWilhelm Wundt's hopes for tbe future of psy­cholinguistics come true.

6. References

Bamberg, M. G. W. (1985). Form and Junction inthe construction oj narratives: Developmental per­spectives. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Uni­versity of California, Berkeley.

Berman, R. A. & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Relatingevents in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmentalstudy. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

Berry, 1. W. (1980). Introduction to methodology.In H. C. Triandis & J. W. Berry (Eds.), Handbookoj cross-cultural psychology. Vol. 2: Methodology(pp. 1-28). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Berry, J. W. & Dasen, P. R. (1974). Introduction:History and method in the cross-cultural study ofcognition. In J. W. Berry & P. R. Dasen (Eds.),Culture and cognition: Readings in cross-culturalpsychology (pp. I- 20). London: Methuan.

Berry, J. w., Dasen, P. R. & Witkin, H. A. (1982).Developmental theories in cross-cultural perspec­tive. In L. L. Adler (Ed.), Cross-cultural research atissue (pp. 13 - 21). New York: Academic Press.

Bowerman. M. (1981). Language development. InH. C. Triandis & A. Heron (Eds.), Handbook ojcross-cultural psychology. Vol. 4: Developmentalpsychology (pp. 93 -185). Boston: AlJyn andBacon.

Braunwald, S. R. & Brislin, R. W. (1979). The di­ary method updated. In E. Ochs & B. SchiefTelin(Eds.). Developmental pragmatics (pp. 21-42).New York: Academic Press.

Brown, E. D. & Sechrest, L. (1980). Experimentsin cross-cultural research. In H. C. Triandis & J. W.Berry (Eds.), Handbook ojcross-culwral psychology.Vol. 2' Methodology. (pp. 297 - 3I8). Boston: Allynand Bacon.

Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (1993). Linguistic andnonJinguistic coding 01 spatial arrays: Explorations

7. Ethnographic Methods

in Mayan cognition. CARG Working paper No.24. Nijmegen: Mimeo.

Bruner, J. S. (1983). Child's talk: Learning to uselanguage. New York: Norton.

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Gunter SenftMax-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguislics,

Nijmegen (The Netherlands)