The effect of variable input on children's acquisition of null subjects

变量输入对儿童习得无效科目的影响

• 批准号: 1322763
• 负责人: Karen Miller
• 金额: $ 26.33万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-01 至 2019-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1322763&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: effect; variable; input; children; acquisition

Language is essential to almost every aspect of our lives and it is absolutely central to learning in school. The goal of first language acquisition research is to determine how children acquire their native language given the linguistic input to which they are exposed. Research has shown that children do not just imitate word-for-word their input; instead, they produce forms not found in their parents' speech, such as "He eat-ed it" or "I'm hang onto-ing it." Moreover, the linguistic input to which children are exposed is quite complex, as utterances do not always match their underlying representation. For example, in sentences like "Do you want to go?" speakers variably omit the first two words, producing: "You wanna go?", "wanna go?", depending on social context. This project examines the impact of this latter sort of variable input on the acquisition of language in children. The empirical domain of this project is the acquisition of properties related to--what has traditionally been called--the Null Subject Parameter in two varieties of Spanish: Dominican Spanish (DS) and Chilean Spanish (ChS). While ChS shows properties of a null subject language, DS displays a number of syntactic properties that are infrequent in other non-Caribbean varieties of Spanish, including variable usage of overt expletive subjects, higher use of overt pronominal subjects in contexts of topic continuity, and variable usage of subject-verb (non)inversion in interrogatives. By comparing acquisition patterns in children exposed to two varieties of the same language, we can compare acquisition of specific grammatical structures in the context of two input types (e.g. consistent input v. variable input) while holding other properties of the language constant. This project will collect 120 hours of naturalistic speech between DS caregivers and their children while they play and read together and 40 hours of Dominican adult-to-adult speech. Audio-recordings and transcriptions will be archived on the CHILDES database (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu) for use by future researchers and will provide much needed data on language development in children acquiring non-mainstream dialects of Spanish, which is important in the context of standardized testing, early education, and clinical intervention in the case of speech disorders. This project will also provide international research experience to both graduate and undergraduate students, who will collect data in the Dominican Republic.

语言对于我们生活的几乎每个方面都是必不可少的，它对于在学校学习绝对是至关重要的。第一语言获取研究的目的是确定孩子如何获取母语的语言意见。研究表明，儿童不仅模仿了他们的意见。取而代之的是，他们产生的形式在父母的演讲中找不到，例如“他吃了它”或“我正在挂在上面”。此外，儿童暴露的语言输入非常复杂，因为话语并不总是与他们的基本表现相匹配。例如，在诸如“你想去的句子？”之类的句子中。演讲者会省略前两个词，产生：“你想去？”，“想去？”，具体取决于社会背景。该项目研究了后一种变量输入对儿童语言获取的影响。该项目的经验领域是收购与传统上所谓的属性相关的属性，其中两种西班牙语中的无效主题参数：多米尼加西班牙语（DS）和智利西班牙语（CHS）。虽然CHS显示了无效的主题语言的属性，但DS显示了许多在其他非加利福尼亚西班牙语品种中很少出现的句法属性，包括可变的公开主题的使用情况，在主题持续性中更高使用公开的代词主题，以及主题范围（非verb（非）跨性别逆转的可变用法。通过比较暴露于同一语言的两个品种的儿童中的获取模式，我们可以比较在两种输入类型的上下文中对特定语法结构的获取（例如一致的输入v。varible输入），同时持有语言常数的其他属性。该项目将在一起玩和阅读时，在DS护理人员和孩子之间收集120个小时的自然主义演讲，以及多米尼加成人到成人的40个小时。音频记录和录音将在Childes数据库（http://childes.psy.cmu.edu）上存档，以供未来的研究人员使用，并将提供有关儿童在获得非主流方言的语言发展的急需数据数据，这些言语是获得西班牙语的非主流方言，这在标准化的测试，早期的教育，早期的教育，临床介入的语言中很重要，以及临床介绍性的诉讼和临床介绍性的诉讼。该项目还将为研究生和本科生提供国际研究经验，他们将在多米尼加共和国收集数据。