Doctoral Dissertation Research: Literacy Effects on Language Acquisition and Sentence Processing in Adult L1 and School-Age Heritage Speakers of Spanish

今天在美国学校的许多英语学习者（ELLs）中，大约75%的人以西班牙语为母语。这意味着近400万儿童在家里说西班牙语，而在英语学校上学。这些孩子接触到的语言变化可能是导致学龄ELLs和他们的单语，说英语的同龄人之间持续存在成就差距的一个因素。研究双语语言在学龄期间是如何发展的，这对于了解影响这个年龄段语言发展的因素和制定促进所有学习者语言发展和学业成功的计划是至关重要的。与历史上的“只讲英语”的方法相反，最近的证据表明，用第一语言和第二语言为ELLs提供学术培训，会在两种语言方面取得更好的成绩。然而，目前尚不清楚是哪些具体的发展方面促成了这一观察结果，以及它们对成年期的长期影响。本研究探讨幼儿第一语言读写能力作为学龄发展的一个重要组成部分，对提高口语理解能力的影响。这项研究的结果将对年轻的英语学习者产生重要的影响，他们通常以第二语言获得阅读和写作技能。本项目从心理语言学的角度探讨识字在学龄ELLs语言发展中的作用。它测试了识字能力增强假说，该假说认为学习阅读和写作可以通过加强个人更有效地监测词形结构的能力来提高语言理解能力。语言学上的重点是西班牙语名词和分词上的性别和数字标记，因为这些通常是追踪复杂句子中所指的重要线索，比如被动语态，这在书面语言中比在口语中更常见。在某些情况下，要想成功地解释西班牙语中看似合理的被动句，就需要听者注意动词和宾语之间的形态句法一致性依赖关系。研究1测试9-10岁讲西班牙语的儿童（一半在双语学校，一半在只讲英语的学校），研究2测试读写水平低到高的讲西班牙语的成年人。两项研究都包括两个相同的实验。一项实验使用视觉世界眼动追踪技术来测量学习西班牙语阅读和写作如何影响说话者在被动句中使用过去分词中的性别标记来预测句子宾语的能力。另一个实验使用事件相关电位（ERPs）来测量大脑对相似句子中关键字的反应差异是否表明读写能力如何影响听觉句子处理过程中句法和语义信息的使用。该研究结果将有助于提高对读写能力和语言知识之间相互作用的理解，以及这种相互作用如何影响具有不同学术语言接触和母语经验的儿童和成人双语者参与口语理解的认知过程。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Of the many English Language Learners (ELLs) in American schools today, roughly 75% speak Spanish as their native language. This represents nearly four million children who speak Spanish at home while attending school in English. The linguistic variation that these children are exposed to is one possible factor that may contribute to the persistent achievement gap between school-age ELLs and their monolingual, English-speaking peers. Research that investigates how bilingual language development progresses during the school-age period is critically needed to understand the factors that affect language development at this age and to develop programs that facilitate linguistic growth and academic success in all learners. Contrary to historical 'English-only' approaches, recent evidence suggests that providing ELLs with academic training in their first and second language leads to better outcomes in both languages. However, it is less clear what specific aspects of development contribute to this observation and what their long-term effects into adulthood may be. This study investigates the impact of literacy in ELLs' first language as one important component of school-age development that may enhance the ability to comprehend oral language. The findings of this study will have important consequences for young ELLs, who commonly acquire reading and writing skills in their second language.This project takes a psycholinguistic perspective to investigate the role of literacy in the language development of school-age ELLs. It tests the Literacy Enhancement Hypothesis, which claims learning to read and write improves language comprehension by strengthening an individual's ability to more efficiently monitor morphological structures. The linguistic focus is gender and number markers on nouns and participles in Spanish because these are often important cues for tracking referents in complex sentences, such as passives, which are more frequent in written than in spoken language. In some cases, successfully interpreting (im)plausible passive sentences in Spanish requires listeners to attend to morphosyntactic agreement dependencies between the verb and its object. Study 1 tests 9-10 year old Spanish-speaking children (half in dual language, half in English only schools) and Study 2 tests low to high literate Spanish-speaking adults. Both studies include two identical experiments. One experiment uses visual world eye tracking techniques to measure how learning to read and write in Spanish affects these speakers' ability to use gender markers on past participles in passives sentences to anticipate the object of a sentence. The other experiment uses event related potentials (ERPs) to measure if differences in brain responses to critical words in similar sentences indicate how literacy impacts the use of syntactic and semantic information during auditory sentence processing. The findings will help improve understanding of the interaction between literacy and linguistic knowledge, and how this interaction impacts cognitive processes involved in oral language comprehension in child and adult bilinguals with different academic language exposure and experience in their native language.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.