Collaborative Research: Effects of Unreliable Input on Children' s Acquisition of Spanish

孩子们在很短的时间内习得一种语言系统，显然不需要付出很大的努力。这是一项艰巨的任务，由于儿童暴露在高度变化的环境中，这项任务变得更加困难。例如，没有两个单词的发音完全相同。方言之间存在差异，说话人内部和说话人之间也存在差异，这与社会经济地位、性别等有关。大多数关于语言习得的研究要么假设儿童接触的语言是不变的，要么在计算或小规模实验室环境中模拟输入的可变性。本项目将研究输入变量对西班牙语两种方言中复数形态习得的影响。智利西班牙语有一个社会语言条件的语音过程，掩盖了复数形态的实现，但墨西哥城西班牙语没有。通过研究儿童如何在自然环境中习得复数标记，研究人员将能够确定（不）可靠的输入如何影响习得过程，以及哪些类型的输入数据与正在建立自己内化语法系统的儿童相关。这两种西班牙语习得过程的比较可以作为关于学习机制与输入数据交互方式的各种假设的试验场。这些研究将提供必要的数据，有助于更好地理解方言变化对儿童早期语言发展的影响。在语言障碍的标准化测试、教学策略和临床干预的背景下，评估儿童的表现时必须考虑方言差异。大约300小时的语音转录将通过一个计算机可搜索数据库提供给其他研究人员，该数据库涉及接触到不同程度省略复数后缀的方言的儿童的复数形态学发展。这些数据可以被语言病理学家用来设计对方言敏感的测试。

Children acquire a linguistic system in a short amount of time and with no great apparent effort. This is a hard task made much harder by the fact that children are exposed to a high degree of variation. For example, no two words are ever pronounced exactly the same way. There is variation across dialects, as well as intra- and inter-speaker variability that can be linked to socio-economic status, gender, etc. Most research on language acquisition has either assumed that the language the child is exposed to is not variable or has modeled input variability either computationally or in a small-scale laboratory setting. This project will examine the effects of input variability on the acquisition of plural morphology in two dialects of Spanish. Chilean Spanish has a socio-linguistically conditioned phonological process which masks the realization of plural morphology, but Mexico City Spanish does not. By studying how children acquire plural markers in a natural setting, researchers will be able to determine how (un)reliable input affects the acquisition process and also what sorts of input data are relevant to the child who is building her own internalized grammatical system.The comparison of the acquisition process in these two varieties of Spanish can be used as a testing ground for various hypotheses about the ways in which the learning mechanism interacts with the input data. These studies will provide much needed data which will contribute to a better understanding of the influence of dialect variation on children's early language development. Dialect variation must be taken into consideration when evaluating children's performance in the context of standardized testing, teaching strategies and clinical intervention in the case of speech disorders. Approximately 300 hours of transcribed speech will be made available to other researchers via a computer searchable database concerning the development of plural morphology in children who are exposed to dialects where the plural suffix is omitted to various degrees. These data can then be used by speech pathologists to design dialect-sensitive tests.