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

大多数关于语言习得的研究都是在稳定和相对同质的环境中进行的。在这些环境中，发育中的儿童通常会迅速有效地成为他们所接触的语言的合格发言者。这个项目考察了儿童在一个不太稳定但很常见的情况下，即语言和方言接触中对语法特性的习得。相互理解的方言有时以不同的方式使用相同的形态单位，并有不同的解释。这为学习者的语言输入创造了很多可变性，然后学习者面临可能为两种不同且可能不兼容的语法提供证据的语言情况。然而，这些孩子确实发展了他们的语言能力，以及产生和理解他们从未听过的句子的能力。因此，接触环境为研究者提供了一个窗口，以检查学习机制如何决定哪些输入属性是“好证据”，哪些不是。因此，这些环境可以阐明学习机制如何科普矛盾或模糊的输入。主要活动将是建立两个语料库的自然主义儿童和成人的两种西班牙语品种的接触（Rioplatense西班牙语和阿根廷布宜诺斯艾利斯的西班牙语口语），并分析儿童的收购语法属性，这表现出在两种方言的变化。完成的语料库将提供给世界各地的其他研究人员（通过儿童发展数据库）。语料库分析将补充实验数据和定期语言分析与成人顾问。我们的目标是提供定性和定量的结果，可以阐明语言习得过程的性质，以及它是如何受到不稳定的变化。

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.