Doctoral Dissertation Research: Acquisition of subject-verb agreement and the role of developing numeracy--A behavioral and electrophysiological study

本论文的目的是加深我们对语言习得与其他认知能力发展之间关系的理解。孩子们似乎毫不费力地迅速学会了他们的第一语言。到三岁时，大多数孩子似乎都能说出语法完整的句子，而且每天能学到多达十个新单词。语言习得是如何发生的一直是语言研究的驱动力问题之一，也是与幼儿发展相关的所有领域的一个重要问题。了解儿童是如何获得第一语言的，对于了解第二语言是如何学习的至关重要，因此对于理解如何更快地将移民儿童融入美国的英语学校也很重要。这一知识还将使我们能够改进我们的工具包，帮助那些受到语言延迟或与发育障碍相关的语言障碍(如特定语言障碍、唐氏综合症和自闭症谱系障碍)的儿童的挑战。这个项目着眼于主谓一致的发展，这是语法的元素，让我们能够区分“绵羊吃草”和“绵羊吃草”，例如。到目前为止的研究表明，儿童在理解之前就能准确地产生主谓一致。这似乎是一种悖论，因为人们通常认为儿童在开始使用语言之前就理解了语言结构。这项研究将调查说英语的学龄前儿童大脑如何处理这一语法特征，以及儿童如何产生和理解它，以建立一个模型，说明这些能力在3-5岁之间的发展过程。儿童的数字技能也将被测量，以观察他们对数字线的概念是否影响他们对主谓一致的单复数区分的理解，主谓一致的单复数区分在英语规则动词上标有-S或没有-S。这篇论文将支持第一项研究，以一种综合的方法来研究这一问题，该方法考虑了句子的神经加工、产生和理解，以及认知成熟因素，包括计算技能的成熟。这项研究的结果将帮助我们了解说英语的儿童的语法发展，并验证一种研究儿童语言发展的方法，这种方法可以推广到其他已经观察到明显悖论的语言，包括德语、法语、西班牙语和班图语科萨语。

The goal of this dissertation project is to deepen our understanding of how language acquisition is related to the development of other cognitive abilities. Children seem to learn their first language effortlessly and rapidly. By three years of age, most children appear to speak in fully grammatical sentences and are able to learn up to ten new words every day. How language acquisition happens continues to be one of the driving questions in language research and an important one for all fields related to early childhood development. Knowing how children acquire a first language is crucial for understanding how a second language is learned and therefore is important for understanding how to more quickly integrate immigrant children into English-language schools in the US. This knowledge will also allow us to improve our toolkits for helping children who are challenged by language delays or by language impairments associated with developmental disorders such as Specific Language Impairment, Down Syndrome, and Autism Spectrum Disorders. This project looks at the development of subject-verb agreement, which is the element of grammar that allows us to distinguish between "The sheep grazes" and "The sheep graze", for example. Research to date suggests that children can produce subject-verb agreement accurately before they comprehend it. This appears to be a paradox because it is generally assumed that children understand language structures before they begin to produce them in speech. This study will investigate how English-speaking preschoolers' brains process this grammatical feature, and how well children produce and comprehend it, to develop a model of the relationship between these abilities as they develop between the ages of 3 and 5 years. Children's number skills will also be measured to look at whether their conception of the number line influences how well they comprehend the singular-plural distinction of subject-verb agreement, which is marked on English regular verbs by "-s" or no "-s". This dissertation grant will support the first study to investigate this question with a comprehensive approach that takes into account neural processing, production and comprehension of the sentences, as well as cognitive maturational factors, including maturation of numeracy skills. The results of this study will help us to understand grammatical development in English-speaking children and validate an approach to research on child language development that can be extended to other languages in which the same apparent paradox has been observed, including, German, French, Spanish, and the Bantu language Xhosa.