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

世界上每个社区都有一种语言。在每个社区，在几年内，孩子们以很高的准确率学习他们所在环境的语言。至少精通一门语言对于学习社区文化、与同龄人交流和接受教育至关重要。当语言延迟时，发育的其他方面可能也会受到威胁。因此，研究儿童语言是如何发展的，对于理解语言如何与其他系统相互作用，以及识别和诊断语言延迟都是非常重要的。虽然孩子们学习语言的速度很快，但在他们的第一语言达到很高的熟练程度后，他们仍然会犯一些错误。这些错误，因为它们是如此罕见，为语言发展的机制提供了有用的见解。许多成人与语言互动的一般认知过程都比语言发展得晚得多，这就引出了一个问题：儿童的语言错误在多大程度上是由非语言过程造成的，而不是不完整的语言知识？这项研究以儿童对附属控制的理解为例，以《约翰在人行道上绊倒后撞到玛丽》为例来研究这一问题。对于这句话，成年人只能理解约翰绊倒的意思，而儿童被报道的解释范围更广，约翰、玛丽或任何人都绊倒了。到目前为止，所有关于儿童的辅助控制的描述都引用了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，但儿童的非语言加工机制比成人更容易出错，在高加工负荷的背景下掩盖了儿童的知识。本研究以成人句子加工中的类似句操作为基础，考察了加工负荷对儿童辅助语控制句子理解的影响。这是一个更连续的描述，它将儿童在辅助控制方面的错误与成人的平行影响联系起来，并为未来的研究提供了机会，以探索其他句子类型、加工机制的发展，以及不成熟的加工机制如何影响语言发展。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.