Procedures for the Rapid Documentation of Language Acquisition in an Endangered Language Context

我们目前对人类在几乎没有提示或有意识的学习情况下获得一种语言的基本能力的理解，主要是基于具有强大语言社区的大型语言。研究表明，一个说话者社区提供了丰富的言语环境，其中语言被用于各种社交功能，这为儿童获得语言提供了必要的输入。然而，关于濒危语言是如何获得的研究很少。当缺乏健壮和多样的输入时，就声音、短语和句子的复杂性而言，习得的顺序是什么？儿童会犯什么类型的系统性错误？这些错误是否反映了正在进行的内部规则管理的语法系统？来自濒危语言的数据对回答这些问题至关重要，这些证据必须立即收集，因为仍然存在代际传播的小语言很少。堪萨斯大学的克利夫顿·派伊将与一个国际团队合作，记录收购北帕姆的事件，这是一种奥托马西语，墨西哥圣路易斯波托西州约有5000人使用。在七个主要的北部帕梅村庄中，只有两个村庄的儿童说北部帕梅语，即使在这些社区，学龄儿童也经常在家里使用西班牙语。Pye和他的团队与Pame的助手合作转录和翻译Pame儿童的语音，他们将使用一个原型程序来快速记录濒危语言的习得。该项目将包括对堪萨斯大学的研究生和本科生进行语言文件和数据归档方法方面的培训。所有收集到的数据都可以通过拉丁美洲土著语言档案馆查阅。

Our current understanding of the fundamental human ability to acquire a language with little prompting or conscious learning is based primarily on large languages with robust speech communities. Research has shown that a speaker community providing a rich speech environment where language is used for a variety of social functions provides the input necessary for a child to acquire a language. However, there is little research on how endangered languages are acquired. What is the order of acquisition, in terms of complexity of sounds, phrases, and sentences, when there is lack of robust and varied input? What types of systematic errors do children make and are these errors reflective of an ongoing internal rule-governed grammatical system? Data from endangered languages are crucial in answering these questions and this evidence must be gathered immediately since there are few small languages where intergenerational transmission is still occurring.Clifton Pye of the University of Kansas will work with an international team to document the acquisition of Northern Pame, an Otomanguean language spoken by approximately 5,000 people in the state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Children only speak Northern Pame in two of the seven principal Northern Pame villages, and even in these communities school-age children frequently use Spanish at home. Pye and his team, working with Pame assistants to transcribe and translate Pame child speech, will use a prototype procedure for the rapid documentation of the acquisition of endangered languages. The project will include the training of graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Kansas in language documentation and data archiving methodology. All the data collected will be accessible through the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.