Doctoral Dissertation Research: Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Raising

博士论文研究：养育习得的干预效果

• 批准号: 1227232
• 负责人: Kamil Deen
• 金额: $ 0.98万
• 依托单位: University of Hawaii
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-08-01 至 2014-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1227232&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Intervention; Effects

Sentences like (i) the boy seems to the girl to be happy are unusual because the subject the boy is understood as being associated with the adjective happy despite the two being distant from each other. Such sentences are referred to as 'raising' sentences because this association is thought to arise from movement of the subject (raising) from a location closer to the adjective. Compare this to (ii) it seems to the girl that the boy is happy, where the subject occurs in its original (unraised) position. Previous research has shown that children have difficulty understanding raising sentences like (i), but not an unraised sentence like (ii). This dissertation research investigates whether the source of difficulty might be reduced to a processing factor referred to as 'intervention' -- the presence of a noun phrase (the girl) intervening between the subject and the location from which it moved. Intervention effects have been observed in many structures that involve such moved elements, including object relative clauses, object wh-questions, etc. The goal of this dissertation is twofold. First, it corrects previously unnoticed flaws in current methodologies, and thus provides a better picture of children's abilities with respect to raising. Second, it offers an explanation for children's difficulty with raising that draws on a phenomenon (intervention) that generalizes across multiple constructions, thereby reducing the observed difficulties with raising to a more general facet of human language processing. The results of this work will allow us to evaluate and compare three different theories that have been proposed to explain intervention effects in the fields of language acquisition and adult sentence processing.Five experiments will be conducted to investigate how children?s comprehension is affected by (i) the presence of an intervening noun in raising structures, (ii) the type of intervening noun (lexical/pronominal), and (iii) the position of the subject (raised and unraised). This dissertation is interdisciplinary in bringing together three different subfields: acquisition, syntax and processing. Furthermore, the approach adopted in this dissertation has the potential to be extended to a variety of additional populations such as L2 learners of English and speakers of other languages that permit raising across another noun phrase.

像（i）the boy seems to the girl to be happy这样的句子是不寻常的，因为主语the boy被理解为与形容词happy相关联，尽管两者彼此相距甚远。这样的句子被称为“提升”句子，因为这种关联被认为是由主语从更接近形容词的位置移动（提升）引起的。把这个与（ii）在女孩看来男孩是快乐的比较，在这里主语出现在它原来的（未抬起的）位置。先前的研究表明，孩子们很难理解像（i）这样的提升句，而不是像（ii）这样的非提升句。本论文的研究探讨了困难的来源是否可以减少到一个加工因素，称为“干预”-存在的一个名词短语（女孩）之间的主题和位置，它从移动。介入效应在许多涉及这种移动成分的结构中被观察到，包括宾语关系从句、宾语疑问句等。首先，它纠正了目前方法中以前未注意到的缺陷，从而更好地了解儿童在抚养方面的能力。第二，它提供了一个解释儿童的困难，提出了一个现象（干预），概括了多个结构，从而减少了观察到的困难，提高到一个更普遍的方面的人类语言处理。这项工作的结果将使我们能够评估和比较三种不同的理论，已提出解释干预效果的语言习得和成人句子处理领域。五个实验将进行调查儿童如何？（i）提升结构中介入名词的存在，（ii）介入名词的类型（词汇/代词），（iii）主语的位置（提升和未提升）。本论文是跨学科的，汇集了三个不同的子领域：习得，句法和处理。此外，本文所采用的方法有可能扩展到各种其他人群，如英语的L2学习者和其他语言的发言者，允许提高另一个名词短语。