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

本论文对英语和冰岛语儿童和成人介词进行了比较。有些介词的用法像虚词(“to”和“of”)，而另一些介词则更像实词(“in”和“on”)。当年幼的孩子产生这些单词时，对自然语言的研究发现，这些类型根据起音和错误来区分。儿童早期句子中缺少的功能成分的一般模式，这种模式在不同语言之间具有有趣的差异，可能反映了语言表征或这些表征加工的局限性。本论文从理解和产出两个方面进行实验研究，以比较这两种不同的解释。冰岛语使用词尾来表示英语对调查中的介词所做的信息。因此，发育相同的英语和冰岛语学习者的表现应该是不同的。语言输出的标准模型得到了来自正常功能和受损成年人的自然和实验数据的很好测试。但是，从这些模型得出的发育预测很少被表述或检验。同样，儿童最早的话语更多地是通过语料库分析的工具来研究的。实验很少关注使用不一致的扬声器中的功能元素。因此，这项研究在方法论上是不寻常的。它也有潜在的应用于受损人群。我们对早期语言产生的了解越详细，我们就越能更好地区分这类人群中的正常错误和非正常错误。最后，冰岛部分将加强亚利桑那大学和冰岛大学语言习得实验室之间的伙伴关系。在雷克雅未克期间，联合教授Pi Nicholas将为培训那里对心理语言学感兴趣的教职员工和学生做出贡献。这将为正在研究本国语言变异的冰岛语言学家提供更多的经验选择。

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.