Doctoral Dissertation Research: Similarity based interference and the acquisition of adjunct control

世界上的每个社区都有一种语言。在每一个社区，儿童在几年之内就能准确地学会他们所处环境的语言。至少精通一种语言对于学习社区文化，与同龄人联系以及接受教育至关重要。当语言发育迟缓时，其他方面的发展也可能处于危险之中。因此，研究儿童的语言发展是非常重要的，无论是了解语言如何与其他系统相互作用，识别和诊断语言延迟。虽然孩子们学习语言很快，但在他们对第一语言达到高度熟练之后，他们仍然会犯一些错误。这些错误，因为它们是如此罕见，提供了有用的见解语言发展的机制。许多一般的认知过程提出与语言在成人中的互动是众所周知的发展远远晚于语言，提出了一个问题：在多大程度上是由于语言外的过程，而不是不完整的语言知识儿童的语言错误？本研究以“约翰在人行道上绊倒后撞了玛丽”为例，探讨儿童对附属控制的理解。对于这句话，成年人只能理解约翰绊倒的意思，而据报道，儿童表现出更广泛的解释，约翰，玛丽或任何人绊倒。迄今为止，所有关于儿童附属控制的研究都将不完整的知识作为儿童解释的来源;本研究寻求另一种解释--儿童的知识是完整的，但儿童的语言外加工机制比成人更容易出错，在高加工负荷的语境中掩盖了儿童的知识。本研究以成人句子加工中的同类句子为研究对象，考察了加工负荷对儿童理解附加控制句子的影响。利害攸关的是一个更连续的帐户，涉及儿童的错误，在成人的附属控制平行的影响，并提出了机会，为未来的研究，调查其他句子类型，发展的处理机制，以及如何不成熟的处理机制影响语言的发展。这项研究还包括对当地家庭和高中的外展部分，并将为本科生研究助理提供研究经验。

Every community around the world has a language. In each community, within a few years and with high accuracy, children learn the language of their environment. Achieving high proficiency in at least one language is critical for learning the culture of the community, connecting with peers, and accessing an education. When language is delayed, other aspects of development may also be at risk. Studying how language develops in children is therefore of great importance, both for understanding how language interacts with other systems, and for identifying and diagnosing language delays. Although children learn language quickly, they continue to make some errors well after they achieve high proficiency in their first language. These errors, because they are so rare, provide useful insights into the mechanisms of language development. Many of the general cognitive processes proposed to interact with language in adults are known to develop much later than language, raising the question: to what extent are children's linguistic errors due to extra-linguistic processes, rather than incomplete linguistic knowledge?This research uses children's understanding of adjunct control, as in "John bumped Mary after tripping on the sidewalk," as a case study to investigate this question. For this sentence, adults only access a meaning in which John tripped, while children have been reported to exhibit a much wider range of interpretations, in which John, Mary or anyone tripped. All accounts to date of adjunct control in children have cited incomplete knowledge as the source of children's interpretations; this research pursues an alternative account--that children's knowledge is complete, but the extra-linguistic processing mechanisms are more error-prone in children than in adults, masking children's knowledge in contexts with a high processing load. Based on the manipulations used with similar types of sentences in adult sentence processing, this research investigates the effects of processing load on children's interpretations of sentences with adjunct control. At stake is a more continuous account that relates children's errors for adjunct control to parallel effects in adults, and presents the opportunity for future research to investigate other sentence types, the development of processing mechanisms, and how immature processing mechanisms affect language development. This research also includes an outreach component to local families and high schools, and will provide research experience to an undergraduate research assistant.