Doctoral Dissertation Research: Psycholinguistic Studies of Prepositions in English and Icelandic

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This dissertation project compares prepositions in English-speaking and Icelandic-speaking children and adults. Some prepositions behave like function words ("to" and "of"), and others more like content words ("in" and "on"). While young children produce these words, research on natural speech finds the types differentiated by onset and errors. The general pattern of function elements missing from children's early sentences, a pattern with intriguing variation across languages, could reflect limitations either in linguistic representations or in the processing of those representations. The dissertation experiments probe both comprehension and production in order to compare these different accounts. Icelandic uses word endings to indicate the information that English does with the prepositions under investigation. Developmentally equivalent learners of English and Icelandic are therefore expected to perform differently.Standard models of language production are well tested by natural and experimental data from normally functioning and impaired adults. But developmental predictions from these models are rarely articulated or tested. Likewise, children's earliest utterances are more often studied with the tools of corpus analysis. Experiments rarely focus on function elements in speakers who use them inconsistently. This research is thus methodologically unusual. It also has potential application to impaired populations. The more detailed our understanding of early language production, the better we will be able to distinguish normal from non-normal error in such populations. Finally, the Icelandic component will enhance the partnership between language acquisition laboratories at the University of Arizona and the University of Iceland. While in Reykjavik, co-PI Nicholas will contribute to training faculty and students there who are newly interested in psycholinguistics. This will broaden the empirical options for Icelandic linguists who are studying variation in their language.