Doctoral Dissertation Research: Children's Awareness of Syntactic Ambiguity

识字教育是一个具有国家重要性的主题，因为一个国家成年人口的阅读技能影响到他们的生产力和经济发展。成年人在阅读方面的困难往往是从童年早期就开始了。因此，在小时候就探索所有能使阅读成功的技能是至关重要的。本研究探讨儿童对歧义的意识，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和声音的对应关系后，他们开始阅读句子和课文。意识到一个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，很多孩子都在为此而挣扎。根据国家教育统计中心的数据，只有46%的三年级学生能够使用上下文线索从文本中获得意义。由于歧义检测会影响文本理解，因此是否可以通过训练来提高歧义检测是一个重要的问题。关注模棱两可的句子可以补充早期识字课程，并为有困难的读者提供干预技术。本研究从心理语言学的角度探讨了儿童对句法歧义的意识，如下面这句话：“男孩用望远镜看到了女孩。如果介词短语“with binoculars”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 girl”，这个句子的意思是这个男孩看到了那个拿着望远镜的女孩。这两个句子的意思有很大的不同，检测这种歧义影响文本的理解。本项目的一项研究调查学龄前儿童是否有意识地意识到这样一个句子有多重含义。第二项研究探讨了是否可以通过几周的简单训练来提高歧义意识。第二项研究还探讨了歧义检测的改善和阅读准备程度的改善之间的相关性。本研究为儿童语言知识的发展提供了新的数据，推动了语言发展研究的发展。它也与句子处理的研究有关，这些研究表明，儿童依赖的信息类型比成年人少。

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.