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

博士论文研究：传统发言者在在线理解过程中对西班牙语虚拟语气的处理。

• 批准号: 1939903
• 负责人: Paola Dussias
• 金额: $ 1.48万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-02-15 至 2022-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1939903&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Heritage; speakers

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.

美国拥有4,840万西班牙裔人，是该国拥有第二大西班牙语者的国家。这些讲话者中有许多是西班牙语的传统演讲者：在讲西班牙语的房屋中长大的英语双语演讲者。过去的研究将遗产语言的语法知识描述为相对于西班牙语单语言的语法知识的缺乏。该论文项目的目的是摆脱这个角度，以更好地了解美国西班牙传统演讲者的语法，为什么这很重要？遗产演讲者的母语经常受到污名。但是，充分的证据表明，维护家庭语言很重要，因为它是语言上最具发达的父母语言，并为学习家庭语言和社交语言提供了最佳基础。因此，对遗产语言的研究有助于验证公众和学术界通常对其进行鄙视的语言实践。计划的研究研究了西班牙语的语法特征，该语法特征被认为是被认为是被遗忘和简化的，并表现出所谓的“侵蚀”，由西班牙人的遗产演讲者：西班牙语：西班牙语封闭性。与过去的研究依赖于说明性的注释不同的是，在使用西班牙虚拟语言中，在语法上“正确”和“不正确”，此处采用的实验材料将镜像从大型语料库中提取的语音。解决了两个问题：（1）生活在长期以来的双语社区中的遗产演讲者对语言因素（词汇和结构）敏感的遗产演讲者限制了西班牙虚拟语言的选择？以及（2）社会因素调节遗产扬声器对情绪选择的敏感性在什么程度上？数据将使用听觉化学计量法收集，并且学生词典的变化将被用作处理难度的索引。在遗产扬声器的背景下，其具有较高的生态有效性，因此被选为数据收集的方法，其语言经验在遗产语言中主要是口头和听觉。通过使用适当的方法论并将语料库数据纳入计划的实验的设计中，目的是为在遗产语言环境中的语言获取和处理理论做出贡献，并具有更大的剥夺性充分性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识优点和广泛的影响来评估，通过评估来诚实地进行评估，以诚实地进行评估。