Monolingual and bilingual infants' sensitivity to agreement morphology in Spanish

描述(由申请者提供)：在学习一门语言时，孩子们必须学会某些单词与某些结尾一致(例如，他同意，但他不同意)。协议形态在语言学习中起着核心作用，一些语言障碍的特征是协议形态问题(例如，特定语言障碍和自闭症)。因此，了解协议形态的学习和处理机制以及它的正常发展过程是很重要的。尽管在美国，双语正在成为一种常态而不是例外，但在双语人群中，协议形态还没有得到广泛的研究。双语儿童经常被错误地归类为语言障碍的风险，因为与单语发展相比，人们对双语语言发展知之甚少。双语发展的差异通常被解释为“非典型发展”。拟议项目的主要目标是记录单语西班牙语和双语(英语/西班牙语)婴儿语法发展的正常时间进程，并确定婴儿对哪些类型的一致形态依赖敏感。更具体地说，该项目使用转头偏好程序技术考察了单语和双语婴儿何时对西班牙语和英语中名词短语(例如，“男孩”而不是“男孩”)中不相邻的形态句法依存关系敏感。这项研究计划是国际语言协会之前对双语人群(英语/西班牙语)进行的单语发展研究的延伸。由于这项研究方案考察了幼儿语法发展的正常时间进程，它提供了有关双语句法理解的信息，这些信息可能导致发展可靠的双语句法发展测量，也可能导致更有效的方法来区分说话迟缓的人和有特殊语言障碍(SLI)的儿童。因此，这项研究计划与健康科学和沟通障碍领域特别相关。本项目收集的数据将作为更广泛的研究项目的基础，该项目将调查单语和双语婴儿的其他类型的形态句法依赖(例如，他会走路，但不会走路)，长期目标是建立双语和单语婴儿语法发展的正常时间进程。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In learning a language a child has to learn that certain words agree with certain endings (e.g., he does but not he do). Agreement morphology occupies a central role in language learning, and several language disorders are characterized by problems with agreement morphology (e.g. Specific Language Impairment and Autism). Thus, it is important to understand the mechanisms involved in learning and processing cases of agreement morphology as well as its normal time course of development. Although bilingualism is becoming the norm rather than the exception in the United States, agreement morphology has not been extensively investigated in bilingual populations. Bilingual children are often miscategorized as at risk for language disorders because little is known about bilingual language development compared to monolingual development. Differences in bilingual development are often interpreted as "atypical development". The primary objective of the proposed project is to document the normal time course of grammatical development in monolingual Spanish and bilingual (English/Spanish) infants, and to determine what types of agreement morphology dependencies infants are sensitive to. More specifically, this project examines when monolingual and bilingual infants are sensitive to non-adjacent morphosyntactic dependencies in the Noun Phrase (e.g., "the boys" but not "a boys") in Spanish and English using the Head-turn Preference Procedure technique. This research program is an extension of the PI's previous research on monolingual language development to a bilingual population (English/Spanish). Because this research proposal examines the normal time course of grammatical development in very young children, it contributes information on bilingual syntactic comprehension that could lead to the development of reliable measures of bilingual syntactic development and could also lead to more effective ways to differentiate late talkers from children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Thus, this research program is particularly relevant for the areas of Health Sciences and Communication Disorders. The data collected in this project will serve as the foundation for a broader research program that will investigate other types of morphosyntactic dependencies (e.g. he walks but not he walk) in monolingual and bilingual infants with the long-term goal of establishing the normal time course of grammatical development in bilingual and monolingual infants.