Bilingual Infants' and Toddlers' Processing of Mixed Language

双语婴幼儿的混合语言处理

• 批准号: 8823479
• 负责人: Casey Lew-Williams
• 金额: $ 7.98万
• 依托单位: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-05-15 至 2017-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8823479
• 关键词: 2 year old; Address; Adult; Affect; Awareness; Back; Belief; Canada; Canis familiaris; Capital; Chicago; Child; Child Language; Code; Cognitive; Communication; Communities; Comprehension; Dimensions; Elements; Environment; Exposure to; Face; Future; Goals; Health; Hearing; Household; Individual; Infant; International; Language; Language Delays; Language Development; Learning; Learning Disabilities; Linguistics; Link; Medial; Minority; National Research Council; Outcomes Research; Parents; Participant; Persons; Population; Procedures; Process; Qualifying; Research; Risk; Socioeconomic Status; Speech; Speed; System; Testing; Time; Toddler; United States; base; bilingualism; cognitive skill; cost; early childhood; experience; language processing; novel; preference; prevent; programs; psychologic; research study; social; sound; word learning

 DESCRIPTION: Many children both in the United States and around the world grow up bilingual, and as a consequence face substantial challenges in language learning. Contrary to popular belief, only a tiny minority of these bilingual children grow up in a strict one-person/one language environment. Instead, most bilingual children regularly hear two different languages from the same person, within the same conversation, and often within the same sentence (i.e., mixed-language sentences such as "Look at the perro!"). While considerable progress has been made in uncovering how young bilinguals process single-language input, very little is known about how they process mixed-language input. The proposed international project leverages the natural complexity observed in bilingual children's language environments, and provides a rigorous test of whether language mixing impacts processing and learning. Specific Aim 1 is to investigate whether bilingual infants differentiate between speech from a single language vs. a mix of two languages. Based on two preliminary studies, Specific Aim 2 is to investigate whether language mixing influences the speed of real-time language processing in bilingual toddlers. Specific Aim 3 is to investigate whether the hypothesized processing cost of language mixing has consequences for recognizing and learning words that occur after a language switch. Previous research has shown that bilingual infants can discriminate between individual sounds as well as full sentences in their two languages, and studies with bilingual adults have shown robustly that language mixing disrupts language processing. Given these findings, we predict that bilingual infants will successfully discriminate between single-language and mixed-language speech (Experiments 1a and 1b), and will show a processing cost of language mixing that delays word recognition (Experiments 2a and 2b) and impairs the comprehension of familiar words and the learning of novel words that occur downstream (Experiments 3a and 3b). The proposed experiments will be conducted simultaneously in two bilingual communities: Spanish/English bilingual children will be tested in Chicago, IL, U.S.A., and French/English bilingual children will be tested in Montr¿al, Qu¿bec, Canada. This approach enables an examination of differences between two communities to address how individual-level factors including socioeconomic status and household use of mixed language affect bilingual infants' and toddlers' processing of mixed language. The results will illuminate how bilingual infants and toddlers navigate the complexities of mixed-language input, which presents an important real-world challenge for language development. The outcomes of this research will inform a significant health concern about the consequences of different types of early bilingual experience, and address parents' questions about how to best support dual- language development in bilingual infants and toddlers.

 描述：美国和世界各地的许多儿童都是在双语环境下长大的，因此在语言学习方面面临着巨大的挑战。与普遍的看法相反，这些双语儿童中只有极少数是在严格的一人/一个环境中长大的。 语言环境。相反，大多数双语儿童经常在同一个对话中、并且经常在同一个句子中听到同一个人说的两种不同的语言（即混合语言句子，例如“Look at the perro！”）。虽然在揭示年轻双语者如何处理单语言输入方面已经取得了相当大的进展，但人们对他们如何处理混合语言输入知之甚少。拟议的国际项目利用了双语儿童语言环境中观察到的自然复杂性，并提供了语言混合是否影响处理和学习的严格测试。具体目标 1 是调查双语婴儿是否区分单一语言和两种语言混合的语音。基于两项初步研究，具体目标 2 是调查语言混合是否影响双语幼儿的实时语言处理速度。具体目标 3 是调查假设的语言混合处理成本是否会对语言切换后发生的单词识别和学习产生影响。先前的研究表明，双语婴儿可以区分两种语言的单个声音和完整句子，而对双语成人的研究也有力地表明，语言混合会扰乱语言处​​理。鉴于这些发现，我们预测双语婴儿将成功区分单语言和混合语言语音（实验 1a 和 1b），并将表现出语言混合的处理成本，从而延迟单词识别（实验 2a 和 2b）并损害对熟悉单词的理解和下游发生的新单词的学习（实验 3a 和 3b）。拟议的实验将在两个双语社区同时进行：西班牙语/英语双语儿童将在美国伊利诺伊州芝加哥进行测试，法语/英语双语儿童将在加拿大魁北克省蒙特利尔进行测试。这种方法可以检查两个社区之间的差异，以解决个人层面的因素（包括社会经济地位和家庭对混合语言的使用）如何影响双语婴儿和幼儿对混合语言的处理。研究结果将阐明双语婴儿和幼儿如何应对混合语言输入的复杂性，这对语言发展提出了重要的现实挑战。这项研究的结果将揭示有关不同类型早期双语经历后果的重大健康问题，并解决家长关于如何最好地支持双语婴儿和幼儿双语发展的问题。