Effects of Variation and Variability in the Acquisition of Two Dialects of Spanish

大多数关于语言习得的工作考察了在稳定和相对同质的环境中习得语言的情况。在这些环境中，通常情况下，发育中的儿童能够迅速有效地说出他们所接触到的语言。这个项目考察了儿童在一种不太稳定但非常常见的情况下获得语法属性的情况，即语言和方言接触。相互理解的方言有时会以不同的方式和不同的解释使用相同的形态单位。这给学习者的语言输入造成了很大的变异性，然后他们面临的语言情况可能会为两种不同的、可能不相容的语法提供证据。然而，这样的孩子确实发展了他们的语言能力，以及产生和理解他们以前从未听说过的句子的能力。因此，接触环境为研究人员提供了一个窗口，以检查学习机制如何决定输入的哪些属性是“好证据”，哪些不是“好证据”。因此，这些环境可以揭示学习机制是如何处理矛盾或模棱两可的输入的。主要活动将是建立两种接触的西班牙语变体(阿根廷布宜诺斯艾利斯说的Rioplatense西班牙语和巴拉圭西班牙语)的儿童和成人自然语言语料库，并分析儿童对语法属性的习得，这些属性在两种方言中表现出差异性。完成的语料库将提供给世界各地的其他研究人员(通过Childes数据库)。语料库分析将得到实验数据和成人顾问定期语言分析的补充。其目的是提供定性和定量的结果，以阐明语言习得过程的性质以及不稳定的可变性如何影响语言习得过程。

Most work on language acquisition examines acquisition of language in stable and relatively homogeneous environments. In these environments typically developing children become competent speakers of the language they are exposed to quickly and efficiently. This project examines children's acquisition of grammatical properties in a much less stable but very common situation, that of language and dialect contact. Mutually intelligible dialects sometimes use the same morphological units in different ways and with different interpretations. This creates a lot of variability in the linguistic input for the learner, who then faces a linguistic situation that may provide evidence for two different and possibly incompatible grammars. Yet such children do develop their linguistic abilities and the capacity to produce and understand sentences they never heard before. Contact environments, therefore, provide a window for the researcher to examine how the learning mechanisms decide which properties of the input are "good evidence" and which are not. These environments can therefore shed light on how the learning mechanisms cope with contradictory or ambiguous input.The principle activities will be to build two corpora of naturalistic child and adult speech of the two Spanish varieties in contact (Rioplatense Spanish and Paraguayan Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, Argentina) and to analyze children's acquisition of grammatical properties, which exhibit variability across the two dialects. The completed corpora will be made available to other researchers worldwide (via the CHILDES database). Corpus analyses will be supplemented with experimental data and regular linguistic analysis with adult consultants. The goal is to provide both qualitative and quantitative results that can shed light on the nature of the language acquisition process and how it is affected by unstable variability.