Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding how minority dialect-speaking children use inflectional verb morphology in sentence processing and word learning.

这个博士论文项目调查了5-10岁的少数民族和大多数讲方言的儿童之间的方言差异如何影响句子处理和单词学习。 方言是受规则支配的语言系统，但方言之间的语言特征往往不同。少数民族社区所讲的方言已被研究，因为它可能对少数民族和多数民族学生之间长期存在的学业成绩差距产生影响。一种说法是，少数民族方言和教学方言之间的语言差异导致方言不匹配，使课堂学习更加困难。然而，目前还不清楚说少数民族方言与学习成绩有何关系，因为这项工作主要是相关的。本研究通过使用对句子理解和语言学习敏感的措施来调查特定的机制来解决这一差距。由于课堂教学的主要方法是通过口头语言，因此必须了解讲少数民族方言的儿童如何使用他们的方言规则来理解学校中常见的多数方言句子。这些结果提高了我们对方言失配如何影响真实的时间学习的理解，同时为新策略创造了途径，这些策略可以支持说不同方言和语言的儿童的口语理解和学习。本研究通过两个实验考察了少数民族和多数民族方言儿童如何利用不同方言之间的主谓一致性来加工多数民族方言句子并进行推理来学习新单词。研究小组之前完成的一项研究表明，少数民族方言儿童使用他们的少数民族方言语法知识来理解由于语言差异而模糊的多数方言句子。然而，缺乏实时的理解措施提出了更多的问题，即儿童依赖什么线索来解释句子，以及它与学习的关系。实验一检验了方言不匹配影响少数民族方言儿童使用与多数民族方言不同的方言特征加工句子的假设。该实验使用眼动追踪任务来评估少数民族方言儿童如何使用主谓一致（例如，was/were）推断歧义多数方言句的主语数。实验2检验了儿童的语言知识会影响他们如何使用主谓一致来对新词进行推断的假设。该实验使用了一个动词学习范式包含形态特征（例如，was/were，is/are）的差异，以检验说多数方言和少数方言的儿童在如何使用形态学作为线索来推断一个新词方面是否存在差异。根据以往的研究结果，少数民族方言儿童在处理多数民族方言句子时，应利用自己的少数民族方言语法知识指导推理。通过研究少数民族方言儿童，研究人员评估具有不同语言经验的儿童如何处理句子，以及语言变化如何塑造儿童在处理熟悉和不熟悉的方言句子时所注意的线索。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响力审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This doctoral dissertation project investigates how dialect differences between minority and majority dialect-speaking children 5-10 years of age impact sentence processing and word learning. Dialects are rule-governed linguistic systems, yet linguistic features often differ across dialects. Dialects spoken by minority communities have been studied for its potential contribution to longstanding academic performance gaps between minority and majority students. One suggestion is that linguistic differences between a minority dialect and the dialect of instruction lead to a dialect mismatch that makes learning more difficult in the classroom. However, it remains unclear how speaking a minority dialect is related to academic performance because the work is primarily correlational. This study addresses that gap by investigating specific mechanisms using measures that are sensitive to sentence comprehension and language learning. Since the primary method of instruction in the classroom is through oral language, it is essential to understand how minority dialect-speaking children use the rules of their dialect to understand majority dialect sentences of the type more commonly found in schools. These results improve our understanding of how dialect mismatch impacts learning in real time while creating avenues for new strategies that can support spoken language comprehension and learning for children who speak different dialects and languages. The current research uses two experiments to investigate how minority and majority dialect-speaking children use subject-verb agreement, which differs between the dialects, to process majority dialect sentences and make inferences to learn new words. A previous study completed by the research team demonstrates that minority dialect-speaking children use their grammatical knowledge of their minority dialect to comprehend majority dialect sentences that were ambiguous due to linguistic differences. However, the absence of real-time measures of comprehension raises additional questions about what cues children rely on for sentence interpretation and how it relates to learning. Experiment 1 tests the hypothesis that dialect mismatch impacts how minority dialect-speaking children use dialect features marked differently than a majority dialect to process sentences. The experiment uses an eye-tracking task to evaluate how minority dialect-speaking children use subject-verb agreement (e.g., was/were) to infer the subject number in ambiguous majority dialect sentences. Experiment 2 tests the hypothesis that children’s language knowledge will shape how they use subject-verb agreement to make inferences about new words. The experiment uses a verb learning paradigm containing morphological features (e.g., was/were, is/are) that differ between the majority and minority dialect to examine if there are differences in how majority and minority dialect-speaking children use the morphology as a cue to make inferences about a new word. Based on results from previous studies, minority dialect-speaking children should use their grammatical knowledge of the minority dialect to guide the inferences they make when processing majority dialect sentences. By studying minority dialect-speaking children, the researchers evaluate how children with diverse linguistic experiences process sentences and how linguistic variation shapes what cues children attend to when processing sentences in both a familiar and unfamiliar dialect.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.