Doctoral Dissertation Research: Children's Awareness of Syntactic Ambiguity

博士论文研究：儿童句法歧义意识

• 批准号: 1451665
• 负责人: Cecile McKee
• 金额: $ 1.81万
• 依托单位: University of Arizona
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-02-01 至 2017-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1451665&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Children; Awareness

Literacy education is a topic of national importance because the reading skills of a nation's adult population affect their productivity and economic advancement. Adults who struggle with reading often have done so since early childhood. Thus, it is essential to probe all skills that lead to reading success at an early age. This research examines children's awareness of ambiguity, a linguistic skill that contributes to reading. After children learn letter-sound correspondences in words, they begin reading sentences and texts. Awareness of when a sentence has multiple meanings helps the reader integrate the sentence into the whole text using context cues. Many children struggle with this, however. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 46% of third-graders are able to use context cues to derive meaning from a text. Because ambiguity detection influences text comprehension, the question of whether it can be improved with training is important. Focus on ambiguous sentences could supplement early literacy curriculum and inform intervention techniques for struggling readers. This psycholinguistic research explores children's awareness of syntactic ambiguity, as illustrated in this sentence: "The boy saw the girl with binoculars." If the prepositional phrase "with binoculars" modifies the verb "saw," then this sentence means that the boy used binoculars to see the girl. If it modifies the noun phrase "the girl," the sentence means that the boy saw the girl who has the binoculars. The two sentence meanings have very different meanings, and detecting such ambiguity influences text comprehension. One of the studies in this project investigates whether pre-school children are consciously aware that such a sentence has multiple meanings. The second study asks whether ambiguity awareness can be improved with simple training over a period of a few weeks. The second study also examines correlations between improvement in ambiguity detection and improvements on measures of reading readiness. This research advances the study of language development with new data on children's linguistic knowledge. It is also relevant to a body of research on sentence processing suggesting that children rely on fewer types of information than adults do.

扫盲教育是一个具有全国重要性的话题，因为一个国家成年人口的阅读技能会影响他们的生产力和经济进步。阅读困难的成年人通常从童年时期就开始这样做。因此，有必要在很小的时候就探索导致阅读成功的所有技能。这项研究考察了儿童的歧义意识，这是一种有助于阅读的语言技能。当孩子们学会了单词中字母与声音的对应关系后，他们就开始阅读句子和文本。意识到句子何时具有多种含义可以帮助读者利用上下文线索将句子整合到整个文本中。然而，许多孩子都在为此挣扎。根据国家教育统计中心的数据，只有 46% 的三年级学生能够利用上下文线索从文本中获取含义。由于歧义检测会影响文本理解，因此是否可以通过训练来改进歧义检测的问题很重要。关注歧义句子可以补充早期识字课程，并为阅读困难的人提供干预技巧。这项心理语言学研究探讨了儿童对句法歧义的意识，如这句话所示：“男孩用双筒望远镜看到了女孩。”如果介词短语“with binoscopy”修饰动词“saw”，那么这句话的意思是男孩用双筒望远镜看女孩。如果它修饰名词短语“the girls”，则该句子意味着男孩看到了拥有双筒望远镜的女孩。这两个句子的含义有很大不同，检测这种歧义会影响文本理解。该项目的一项研究调查了学龄前儿童是否有意识地意识到这样的句子有多种含义。第二项研究询问是否可以通过几周的简单训练来提高歧义意识。第二项研究还检验了歧义检测的改进与阅读准备度的改进之间的相关性。这项研究利用儿童语言知识的新数据推进了语言发展的研究。这也与一系列关于句子处理的研究有关，这些研究表明儿童比成人依赖更少类型的信息。