Doctoral Dissertation Research: Acquisition of grammatical variation: Differential object marking in heritage speakers

根据人口普查局的数据，美国有超过4100万人在家说西班牙语。越来越多在家里说西班牙语长大的美国孩子是如何在成年后学习和使用西班牙语的，理解这一点很重要。这个项目的目标是探索在美国长大的双语成年人在家里说西班牙语，在学校说英语的可变语法形式的使用；这些会说两种语言的成年人也被称为“传统发言人”。研究变量模式可以使我们对美国语境下的双语语言习得有更全面的了解。通过科学和公共渠道传播这个项目的发现有助于研究人员和教育工作者制定更有效的教育策略，并提高语言病理学家在临床环境中评估语言能力的能力。先前的研究表明，传统语言使用者在使用语法形式方面表现出显著的差异。这种可变性可以追溯到语言特定因素以及个人语言经验的各个方面。虽然不同的语法模式出现在不同的语言和语言群体中，但这些模式很少在传统语言使用者中进行研究。本项目使用传统语言使用者和单语使用者的句子重复任务来检查对差异对象标记（DOM）分布的竞争影响之间的权衡，这是一种在许多语言中发现的现象，其中句子中的某些对象伴随着前缀/后缀，介词或其他标记。该项目解决了以下问题：(1)传统语言使用者如何获得诸如DOM之类的可变语法模式？(2)哪些语言和语言外因素制约了传统说话者使用可变模式？(3)不同世代的双语使用者的可变用法是如何变化的？这种结合变异、语言习得和跨代传承者研究的新方法有很大的潜力有助于我们理解双语和语言习得。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

According to the Census Bureau, more than 41 million people in the US speak Spanish at home. It is important to understand how the growing number of US children who are raised speaking Spanish at home come to acquire and use language as adults. The goal of this project is to explore the use of a variable grammatical form in bilingual adults who were raised in the US speaking Spanish at home and English in school; these bilingual adults are also known as “heritage speakers”. Examining variable patterns leads to a more comprehensive understanding of bilingual language acquisition in the US context. Disseminating the findings from this project through both scientific and public channels helps researchers and educators to develop more effective educational strategies and improves speech-language pathologists' ability to assess language abilities in clinical settings. Previous studies have shown that heritage speakers demonstrate significant variability in their use of grammatical forms. This variability can be traced to language-specific factors as well as aspects of an individual’s language experience. While variable grammatical patterns appear across languages and speech communities, these patterns are rarely studied in heritage speakers. This project uses a sentence repetition task with heritage language speakers and monolinguals to examine the trade-off between competing influences on the distribution of differential object marking (DOM), a phenomenon found in a number of languages where certain objects in a sentence are accompanied by a prefix/suffix, preposition, or other marker. The project addresses the following questions: (1) How do heritage speakers acquire variable grammatical patterns such as DOM? (2) What are the linguistic and extralinguistic factors that constrain heritage speakers’ use of variable patterns? (3) How does variable usage change across generations of bilingual speakers? This novel approach combining the study of variation, language acquisition, and cross-generational heritage speakers has significant potential to contribute to our understanding of bilingualism and language acquisition.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.