11th International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association (GCLA/DGKL). Am 1.9.2026 präsentiere ich mein Sprachspinat-Spiele-Toolkit bei der International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association (GCLA/DGKL). Am 5.9.2026 erscheint hier der vollständige Bericht zur Tagung und meiner Präsentation im Rahmen der Games Session. Heute findet man hier bereits relevante Materialien.
3 Games
- Semi‑structured “bag” game (ages 1.5–4 years):Toy animals or other objects are hidden in pockets on a large bag; children find and name the items, allowing us to study child-parent interactions, children’s early vocabulary and turn‑taking.
- Puzzle or matching game (preschool/early school age):Children search for pictures that match images on a mat (or on a puzzle board created using toolkit materials). The pictures differ minimally (e.g., the small blue balloon the small red balloon vs. the big red balloon), so precise descriptions are required. This game is suitable for eliciting fine‑grained descriptive language.
- Barrier game (older children/adults): One partner creates what the other partner sees on their side of a barrier, promoting referential communication and collaborative problem solving.
You can find more descriptions on my old blog, where I describe games created with earlier and less modularized versions of my game materials.
Die Puzzeltask mit dem „Language in a Bag“ Toolkit beim Colchester Children’s Festival
Publications about the Toolkit Tasks
Eisenbeiss, Sonja. 2010. Production methods. In Elma Blom & Sharon Unsworth (eds.), Experimental methods in language acquisition research, 11-34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eisenbeiss, Sonja. 2009. Contrast is the name of the game: Contrast-based semi-structured elicitation techniques for studies on children’s language acquisition. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 57(7).
Animal pictures that have been developed to be used with the toolkit are available for download in a previous blog posts.
Bilder aus dem Bilderset „Sprachspinat-Tierfamilien“ (Künstlerin: Charmaine McKissock)
A description of previous versions of the toolkit and current developments can be found in a previous blog post.
Ein älteres Materialset für die Bag-Task
The toolkit is part of the Sprachspinat-concept that combines language education, education about nature and education for sustainable development. You can find more information about this concept in my YouTube video (English, with subtitles in many languages) and in a blog entry with the handout for a German presentation.
Poster: „Das Sprachspinat-Konzept zur spielerischen Verbindung von Sprachbildung, Naturbildung und Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung (BNE)“
Selected Publications with Data Collected using Toolkit Tasks
Mitrofanova, N., & Westergaard, M. (2018). Acquisition of locative utterances in Norwegian: structure-building via lexical learning. Journal of Child Language, 45(4), 981-1005.
Slobin, Dan, Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown, Sonja Eisenbeiss & Bhuvana Narasimhan. 2011.Putting things in places: Developmental consequences of linguistic typology. In Jürgen Bohnemeyer & Eric Pederson (eds.), Event representation in language and cognition, 134-165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eisenbeiss, Sonja, Ayumi Matsuo & Ingrid Sonnenstuhl. 2009. Learning to encode possession. In William McGregor (ed.), The expression of possession, 143-211. Berlin: deGruyter.
Bowerman, Melissa, Penny Brown, Sonja Eisenbeiss, Bhuvana Narasimhan & Dan Slobin. 2004. “Putting things in places”: Effekte linguistischer Typologie auf die Sprachentwicklung. In Gottfried Plehn (ed.), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Jahrbuch 2004. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.
Upcoming Event with Toolkit Games
