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

世界上每个社区都有自己的语言。在每个社区，孩子们在几年内就能以很高的准确率学会他们所处环境的语言。精通至少一门语言对于学习社区文化、与同龄人交流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受到影响。因此，研究儿童的语言发展是非常重要的，无论是理解语言如何与其他系统相互作用，还是识别和诊断语言延迟。虽然孩子们学语言很快，但在他们的第一语言达到很高的熟练程度之后，他们仍然会犯一些错误。由于这些错误非常罕见，因此为了解语言发展的机制提供了有用的见解。众所周知，许多与成人语言相互作用的一般认知过程的发展要比语言晚得多，这就提出了一个问题：儿童的语言错误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？本研究使用儿童对辅助控制的理解，如“约翰在人行道上绊倒后撞了玛丽”，作为案例研究来调查这个问题。对于这句话，成年人只理解约翰绊倒的意思，而据报道，孩子们表现出更广泛的解释，约翰、玛丽或任何人绊倒了。迄今为止，所有关于儿童辅助控制的报道都指出，儿童的解释来源是不完全的知识；本研究追求另一种解释——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，这掩盖了儿童在高加工负荷背景下的知识。本研究以成人句子加工中相似类型句子的加工为基础，探讨了加工负荷对儿童辅词控制句子解释的影响。关键是一个更连续的解释，将儿童对辅词控制的错误与成人的平行效应联系起来，并为未来研究其他句子类型、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提供机会。这项研究还包括对当地家庭和高中的外展组成部分，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.