Collaborative Research: Cross-Linguistic Investigations of the Acquisition of Subject-Verb Agreement

主谓一致在许多语言中普遍存在，是儿童必须掌握的最早的句法关系之一。先前的研究表明，它的习得过程在不同的语言中是不同的：在英语，西班牙语和科萨语（班图人）中观察到早期的生产，但后期的理解，而生产和理解都在法语中早期（30个月大）。Legendre博士和巴里埃博士在这个合作项目中的PI试图通过评估儿童可以更好地和更早地在语言中检测协议标记的假设来调和这些结果，这些标记在感知上是突出的，语义上是透明的。该研究项目将针对四种语言，因为它们的相关属性允许将一些因素分开：英语，西班牙语，法语和海地克里奥尔语。该项目的创新之处在于，它试图从理论层面和跨语言层面探讨感知因素的作用，并通过融合理论句法学、心理语言学、语料库分析和言语感知的研究，并结合各自的研究方法，促进跨学科的语言习得研究。 该项目将促进美国PI与法国研究顾问之间的国际合作，并将为博士后研究人员以及美国两个研究中心的研究生和本科生提供宝贵的研究经验。

Subject-verb agreement is pervasive in many languages and it is one of the earliest syntactic relations that children must master. Prior research has suggested that its course of acquisition is different in different languages: early production but late comprehension have been observed in English, Spanish and Xhosa (Bantu) while production and comprehension are both early in French (by 30 months of age). The PIs in this collaborative project, Dr. Legendre and Dr. Barriere, seek to reconcile these results by evaluating the hypothesis that children can detect agreement markers better and earlier in languages in which these markers are both perceptually salient and semantically transparent. The research project will target four languages chosen because their relevant properties allow a number of factors to be teased apart: English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole. This project is innovative in seeking to investigate the role of perceptual factors, both at the sentential level and cross-linguistically, and fosters interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language acquisition by melding research in theoretical syntax, psycholinguistics, corpus analysis, and speech perception, and combining their respective research methods. The project will stimulate international collaborations between the PIs in the US and research consultants in France, and will provide valuable research experience for a post-doctoral researcher, and for graduate and undergraduate students at the two US sites.