Collaborative Research: Children's Planning and Production of Filler-gap Constructions

该补助金支持对语言产生系统的合作研究，特别是它如何在儿童中发展。五项研究通过操纵某些句子结构的属性来检查流利性和句子规划困难点。这些句子强调关系从句，例如在句子“女孩找到了男孩打电话给的老师”中的“男孩打电话给谁”。“这样的结构挑战了句子规划机制，因为关系从句涉及不同元素之间的关系（教师和谁与这里的例子中的呼叫有关）。本研究比较了不同结构和年龄的说话者之间的停顿和重新开始等不流利现象。跨结构的比较评估规划单元，如子句，以及可能强调句子规划的内容，如相关元素之间的距离。跨扬声器的比较评估处理这种压力的系统的发展变化。实验使用两种方法来研究语言产生。一个是模仿任务，人们听一个故事，然后模仿他们听到的关于这个故事的句子;另一个是启发任务，人们产生自己的句子来指定故事中的某个角色。方法论和结构重点的结合有可能产生对发展和成熟语言产生建模都具有变革性的结果。阐明发展中的产生系统有助于区分这种动态系统（产生语言的实时行为）的影响和更静态的知识系统（内部语言原则）的影响。这一点在认知发展的各个领域都很重要，因为这些领域的研究往往依赖于儿童的言语。儿童的言语在语言和发展科学以外的领域也很重要（例如，在法院系统以及在诊断和治疗各种损伤方面）。更好地理解的多重和相互作用的影响，正常发展的儿童的讲话，最终必须适用于这些领域。该项目还为缅因州和亚利桑那州的本科生和研究生提供研究机会，主要依靠学徒和独立学习经验。该补助金包括对学生参与专业会议演讲等传播活动的年度支持。最后，对合作的支持直接涉及特定伙伴关系中的研究和教育基础设施，并加强与这种伙伴关系有关的网络，包括学生参与所有此类活动。

This grant supports collaborative research on the language production system, especially how it develops in children. Five studies examine fluency and points of sentence planning difficulty by manipulating properties of certain sentence structures. The sentences emphasize relative clauses, exemplified by "who the boy was calling" in the sentence "The girl found the teacher who the boy was calling." Such structures challenge the sentence planning mechanism because the relative clause involves relationships among different elements (teacher and who relate to calling in the example here). This research compares nonfluencies like pauses and restarts across both structural variations and ages of speakers. The comparison across structures evaluates planning units, such as clauses, and what might stress sentence planning, such as distance between related elements. The comparison across speakers evaluates developmental changes in the system that handles such stresses. The experiments use two methods for studying language production. One is an imitation task, where people listen to a story and then imitate a sentence they hear about the story; the other is an elicitation task, where people produce their own sentence to designate a certain character in the story. The combination of methodology and structural emphasis here has the potential to produce outcomes that are transformative for both developmental and mature language production modeling. Shedding light on the developing production system helps distinguish the effects of this dynamic system (the real-time act of producing language) from the effects of more static knowledge systems (the internal linguistic principles). This matters across domains of cognitive development, where research often relies on children's speech. Children's speech is also central in domains other than language and developmental sciences (e.g., in the court system and in the diagnosis and treatment of various impairments). Better understanding of the multiple and interacting influences on normally developing children's speech must eventually apply to such domains. The project also provides research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in Maine and Arizona, relying heavily on apprenticeship and independent study experiences. This grant includes annual support for student involvement in dissemination activities like professional conference presentations. Finally, support for the collaboration directly addresses the infrastructure for research and education in a particular partnership and strengthens the networks associated with this partnership, including students in all such activities.