Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cross-Linguistic Investigations of Syntactic Creativity Errors in Children's Wh-questions

儿童在学习语言方面表现出非凡的天赋，并在四岁时就掌握了语言的大部分语法。这种非凡的技能导致了一种假设，即儿童在完成这项任务时具有天生的能力，能够学习某些类型的语法模式，即世界语言中表现出来的那些模式。通过接触，他们了解到哪些模式与他们的语言相关。例如，学习英语的儿童最初会产生一种复杂的问题，这种问题不是英语中的语法问题，而是类似于德语的语法问题。随着时间的推移，他们了解到这个句型不是英语，不再使用它。对这些错误的另一种解释是，有限的一般认知能力，特别是记忆、注意力和句子规划导致产生的结果只是表面上类似于德语问题。该项目的目标是通过对比说英语的儿童和说德语的儿童引出的问题和答案，梳理出这些可能的解释。这两个假设预测了不同的错误类型。如果这些错误是与生俱来的，那么说德语的孩子应该会提出一些类似英语的问题。如果错误是认知能力有限的结果，学习每种语言的孩子应该产生与这种倾向不一致的问题。这项研究有可能被用作研究儿童语言和认知发展的临床诊断。这项研究包括新的实验，旨在测试多从句问题的产生和理解。四至六岁的儿童将接受旨在评估他们的注意力、工作记忆和句子规划能力的测试。通过比较英语和德语儿童的表现，本项目将进一步阐明输入在语言学习中的作用，并为说英语的儿童提供比较的基线。新的贡献包括进一步在语言工作中使用和整合心理语言学方法，以及调查德国儿童迄今尚未研究过的对这一复杂句法现象的习得。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Children show remarkable aptitude for learning language and have mastered much of the grammar of their language by age four. This remarkable skill has led to the hypothesis that children come to this task with an innate ability to learn certain types of grammatical patterns, namely those manifested in the languages of the world. Through exposure, they learn which patterns are relevant to their language. For example, children learning English initially produce a type of complex questions not grammatical in English, but resembling grammatical German questions. Over time, they learn this pattern is not English and no longer use it. An alternative explanation for these errors is that limited general cognitive capacities, specifically memory, attention, and sentence planning result in productions which only superficially resemble German questions. The goal of the project is to tease apart these possible explanations through controlled experimentation comparing elicited questions and answers by English speaking children and by German speaking children. The two hypotheses predict different error types. If the errors are the result of an innate predisposition, German speaking children should produce some questions resembling English. If the errors are the result of limited cognitive abilities, children learning each language should produce questions which are not consistent with such a predisposition. This research holds the potential to be used as a clinical diagnostic for investigating children's linguistic and cognitive development. The research comprises novel experiments designed to test production and comprehension of multiclausal questions. Children between the ages of four and six will be given tests designed to assess their attention, working memory, and sentence planning abilities. By comparing performance of English and German speaking children, this project will further illuminate the role of input in language learning and provide a baseline for comparison for English-speaking children. Novel contributions include furthering the use and integration of psycholinguistic methodologies into linguistic work as well as investigating German children's as yet unstudied acquisition of this complex syntactic phenomenon.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.