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

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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.