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

孩子们可以在很短的时间内掌握一套语言系统，而且不需要付出很大的努力。这是一项艰巨的任务，因为儿童暴露在高度变化的环境中，这一事实变得更加困难。例如，没有两个单词的发音是完全相同的。不同的方言之间存在差异，说话者内部和说话者之间的差异可以与社会经济地位、性别等联系在一起。大多数关于语言习得的研究要么假设儿童接触的语言不是可变的，要么通过计算或在小规模的实验室环境中模拟输入差异。本课题将考察输入可变性对西班牙语两种方言复数词法习得的影响。智利西班牙语有一种社会语言条件下的语音过程，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可靠的输入是如何影响习得过程的，以及哪些输入数据与正在建立自己的内化语法系统的儿童相关。这两种西班牙语的习得过程的比较可以作为关于学习机制与输入数据相互作用方式的各种假说的试验场。这些研究将提供急需的数据，有助于更好地了解方言变异对儿童早期语言发展的影响。在评估儿童在标准化测试、教学策略和临床干预方面的表现时，必须考虑到方言差异。其他研究人员将通过计算机可搜索数据库向其他研究人员提供大约300小时的转录语音，该数据库涉及接触不同程度省略复数后缀的方言的儿童复数形态的发展。这些数据可以被言语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.