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

美国拥有4840万西班牙裔人口，是西班牙语使用者人数第二多的国家。这些发言者中的许多人都是西班牙语的传统发言者：在讲西班牙语的家庭中长大的英语双语发言者。过去的研究表明，传统语言的语法知识相对于单语西班牙语者的语法知识是不足的。本论文项目的目标是从这个角度出发，以便更好地了解美国西班牙语遗产发言人的语法。讲传统语言的人的母语往往受到侮辱。然而，有充分的证据表明，保持家庭语言是重要的，因为它是语言学上最发达的父母语言，为学习家庭语言和社会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那些被公众和学术界普遍轻视的语言实践。计划中的研究将考察西班牙语的一个语法特征，该语法特征被认为是被滥用和简化的，并显示出西班牙语传统使用者所谓的“侵蚀”：西班牙语虚拟语气。与过去的研究，依赖于什么是语法上的“正确”和“不正确”的西班牙语虚拟语气的使用规定的概念，这里采用的实验材料将反映自发产生的语音从一个大的语料库中提取。讨论了两个问题：（1）生活在长期双语社区的传统语言使用者对限制西班牙语虚拟语气选择的语言因素（词汇和结构）的敏感程度如何？（2）社会因素在多大程度上调节了传统语言使用者对语气选择的敏感性？将使用听觉瞳孔测量法收集数据，瞳孔扩张的变化将用作处理难度的指标。瞳孔测量法被选为数据收集的方法，因为它的高生态有效性的背景下，遗产扬声器，其语言经验的遗产语言主要是口头和听觉。通过使用适当的方法，并通过纳入语料库数据的设计计划的实验，其目标是有助于语言习得和处理的理论，在遗产的语言环境具有更大的解释力adequaty.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得支持的，通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响力审查标准。

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.