Doctoral Dissertation Research - Acquisition of Questions in Bulgarian and English

在NSF语言学项目和国际科学与工程办公室的支持下，本论文项目将研究保加利亚和英语儿童的语言发展，重点是问题的发展。 以英语为母语的儿童在疑问句（由什么和哪里等词发起）方面表现出相对较长的发展期，即使他们的输入是统一和完美的。 常见的错误是未能包括辅助或未能反转辅助时，它是存在的。 这些错误的来源仍然未知。 在Virginia Valian的指导下，Lidiya Tornyova将比较2至3岁的保加利亚语和英语儿童对yes/no和wh-问题的习得，使用引发模仿任务结合自然观察。 本研究将探讨三个主要的研究问题：1）跨语言差异在语法结构习得过程中的作用是什么？ 2)语言结构特性的规律性在多大程度上决定了语言习得的时间进程和性质？ 3)在两个独立的领域--问题的形成和显性主语的使用--规律性分布的差异是如何影响语言学习的？ 我们预测，保加利亚语和英语中疑问句形成的差异将使保加利亚语中的wh-疑问句更容易习得。我们假设特殊疑问句中的显性主语产出反映了目的语的要求。 由于保加利亚语是一种无主语的语言，我们预测儿童会比说英语的儿童更经常地省略主语。这项研究将通过从跨语言的角度研究习得，增加我们对问题发展的理解。 大多数关于是/否和疑问句习得的数据来自英语。 目前尚不清楚从英语发展而来的主张和假设是否可以扩展到语言，如保加利亚语，这些语言在重要属性上与英语不同。 研究保加利亚语问题的发展也将有助于评估目前英语语言习得研究提出的相互矛盾的主张和假设。 这项研究将是保加利亚语句法习得的第一次调查。 从更广泛的意义上说，该项目将有助于建立关于早期获得保加利亚语的合作研究。 Lidiya Tornyova将与保加利亚索菲亚大学斯拉夫研究助理教授Krassimira Petrova博士合作。 该项目将把保加利亚成人与儿童之间自发对话的录音和翻译提供给儿童发展数据库，建立第一个保加利亚儿童语言在线语料库。

With support from the NSF Linguistics Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering this dissertation project will investigate language development in young Bulgarian and English children, concentrating on the development of questions. Young English-speaking children show a relatively protracted period of development in wh-questions (initiated by words like what and where), even though their input is uniform and perfect. The common errors are failure to include an auxiliary or failure to invert an auxiliary when it is present. The source of these errors is still unknown. Under the direction of Virginia Valian, Lidiya Tornyova will compare acquisition of both yes/no and wh-questions by 2- to 3-year-old Bulgarian- and English-speaking children, using an elicited imitation task in combination with natural observation. The study will address three broad research questions: 1) What is the role of cross-linguistic differences in the process of acquiring grammatical structures? 2) To what extent does the regularity of a language's structural properties determine the time-course and nature of its acquisition? 3) How do the differences in the distribution of regularity in two independent domains - question formation and overt subject use - affect language learning? The differences in question formation in Bulgarian and English will, we predict, make wh-questions easier to acquire in Bulgarian. We hypothesize that overt subject production in wh-questions will reflect requirements of the target language. Since Bulgarian is a null-subject language, we predict children will omit subjects more often than English-speaking children will.The research will increase our understanding of the development of questions by examining acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective. Most of the data on yes/no and wh-question acquisition are from English. It is not known whether claims and hypotheses developed from English can be extended to languages, such as Bulgarian, which differ in important properties from English. Studying the development of Bulgarian questions will also help assess current contradictory claims and hypotheses proposed by studies on English language acquisition. The study will be the first investigation of Bulgarian acquisition of syntax. In a broader sense, the project will help establish collaborative research on early acquisition of Bulgarian. Lidiya Tornyova will collaborate with Dr. Krassimira Petrova, Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. The project will contribute recordings and transcriptions of Bulgarian spontaneous adult-child conversations to the CHILDES data bank, creating the first on-line corpus of Bulgarian child language.