Doctoral Dissertation Research: Heritage speakers processing of the Spanish subjunctive during online comprehension.

美国有4840万西班牙裔美国人，是说西班牙语的人数第二多的国家。这些人中的许多人都是说传统西班牙语的人：说英语的人在讲西班牙语的家庭长大。过去的研究表明，与说单一语言的西班牙语使用者的语法知识相比，传统语言中的语法知识不足。这个论文项目的目标是从这个角度出发，以便更好地理解在美国讲传统西班牙语的人的语法。为什么这很重要？说遗产的人的母语经常被污蔑。然而，充足的证据表明，保持母语很重要，因为它是语言发展最快的父母语言，为学习母语和社交语言提供了最好的基础。因此，对传统语言的研究有助于验证公众和学术界普遍看不起的语言实践。计划中的研究考察了西班牙语的一个语法特征，它被认为是被滥用和简化的，并展示了说西班牙语的传统人士的所谓“侵蚀”：西班牙语虚拟语气。与过去的研究不同的是，过去的研究依赖于在使用西班牙语虚拟语气时，语法上什么是正确的，什么是不正确的规定概念，这里使用的实验材料将反映从大型语料库中自发产生的语音。本文讨论了两个问题：(1)长期生活在双语社区中的遗产说话者对制约西班牙语虚拟语气选择的语言因素(词汇和结构)的敏感度有多高？(2)社会因素在多大程度上调节了遗产说话者对语气选择的敏感度？将使用听觉瞳孔测量法收集数据，并将瞳孔扩大的变化作为处理难度的指标。由于在讲遗产的人的背景下具有很高的生态有效性，因此选择少年测量法作为数据收集方法，因为他们在遗产语言中的语言经验主要是口头和听觉的。通过使用适当的方法并将语料库数据纳入计划实验的设计中，目标是为在遗产语言环境中更好地解释语言习得和处理理论做出贡献。这一奖项反映了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。

With 48.4 million people of Hispanic origin, the U.S. is the country with the second largest number of Spanish speakers. Many of these speakers are heritage speakers of Spanish: English bilingual speakers who are raised in homes where Spanish is spoken. Past studies have characterized grammatical knowledge in the heritage language as deficient relative to grammatical knowledge in monolingual speakers of Spanish. The goal of this dissertation project is to move away from this perspective in order to better understand the grammars of heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S. Why is this important? The home language of heritage speakers is often stigmatized. However, ample evidence suggests that maintaining the home language is important because it is the most linguistically-developed parental language and provides the best foundation for learning both a home language and a societal language. Therefore, the study of heritage languages contributes to the validation of language practices that are commonly looked down upon by the general public and the academic community.The planned study examines a grammatical feature of Spanish that has been argued to be misused and simplified, and to display so-called "erosion" by heritage speakers of Spanish: the Spanish subjunctive. Unlike past research that has relied on prescriptive notions of what is grammatically "correct" and "incorrect" in the use of the Spanish subjunctive, the experimental materials employed here will mirror spontaneously produced speech extracted from a large corpus. Two questions are addressed: (1) To what degree are heritage speakers who live in a long-standing bilingual community sensitive to the linguistic factors (lexical and structural) constraining the selection of the Spanish subjunctive?, and (2) To what degree do social factors modulate heritage speakers’ sensitivity to mood selection? Data will be collected using auditory pupillometry, and changes in pupil dilation will be used an as an index of processing difficulty. Pupillometry was selected as the method of data collection because of its high ecological validity in the context of heritage speakers, whose language experience in the heritage language is mostly oral and aural. By using an appropriate methodology and by incorporating corpus data in the design of the planned experiments, the goal is to contribute to a theory of language acquisition and processing in heritage language contexts with greater explanatory adequacy.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.