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

儿童在很短的时间内就能习得一套语言系统，而且看起来并不费力。这是一项艰巨的任务，由于儿童暴露在高度变化的环境中，这一任务变得更加艰巨。例如，没有两个单词的发音完全相同。有方言之间的变化，以及内部和扬声器之间的变化，可以链接到社会经济地位，性别等大多数语言习得的研究要么假设，儿童接触的语言是不可变的，或已建模输入的变化无论是计算或在一个小规模的实验室设置。本研究将探讨输入变异性对西班牙语两种方言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获得复数标记，研究人员将能够确定如何（联合国）可靠的输入影响着习得过程，也影响着什么样的输入数据与正在建立自己的内化语法系统的儿童有关。这两种西班牙语习得过程的比较可以作为关于学习方式的各种假设的测试基础。机制与输入数据交互。这些研究将为更好地理解方言变异对儿童早期语言发展的影响提供急需的数据。在评估儿童在标准化测试、教学策略和言语障碍临床干预方面的表现时，必须考虑到方言差异。大约300个小时的转录语音将提供给其他研究人员通过计算机搜索数据库，关于发展的复数形态的儿童谁是暴露于方言的复数后缀被省略到不同程度。这些数据可以被语言病理学家用来设计方言敏感性测试。

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.