Doctoral Dissertation Research in Linguistics: Young children's use of prosody in disambiguating sentences: the case of Korean children

在Mazuka灵子博士的指导下，Choi Young gon将为她的博士论文收集数据。她对语言发展的研究将涉及5-10岁的韩国儿童。以前的研究表明，与成年人不同，幼儿不会使用韵律信息来消除句法上的歧义句子(如“用花轻拍青蛙”)。崔女士问，当任务的认知要求不是太高时，儿童是否可以使用韵律线索来解决句法歧义。孩子们将被要求听一个句子，并判断它是否与一幅画相匹配。在第一项研究中，韵律线索将与其他线索(如形态线索)一起呈现，以测试当韵律线索与其他线索结合时，儿童是否能够更好地使用韵律线索。在第二项研究中，歧义名词短语(而不是完整的句子)将被用来测试句法上不那么复杂的结构是否能让孩子更容易地使用韵律线索。这一研究对语言习得和语言理解领域具有重要意义。特别是，由于对幼儿句子加工中韵律和句法之间的相互作用知之甚少，本研究将有助于我们理解幼儿如何发展语言加工策略。由于现有的研究大多侧重于英语，韩语的使用也将为未来的研究提供重要的对比。

Under the direction of Dr. Reiko Mazuka, Ms. Youngon Choi will collect data for her doctoral dissertation. Her research on language development will involve 5-10 year-old Korean children. Previous research suggests that, unlike adults, young children do not use prosodic information to disambiguate syntactically ambiguous sentences (such as "Tap the frog with the flower"). Ms. Choi asks whether children can use prosodic cues to resolve syntactic ambiguity when the cognitive demands of the task are not too great. Children will be asked to listen to a sentence and judge whether it matches with a picture. In the first study, prosodic cues will be presented along with other cues (such as morphological cues) to test whether children are better able to use prosodic cues when they are combined with other cues. In the second study, ambiguous noun phrases (rather than full sentences) will be used to test if syntactically less complex structures allow children to use prosodic cues more easily. This research is significant to the fields of language acquisition and language comprehension. In particular, since little is known about the interaction between prosody and syntax in young children's sentence processing, this research will contribute to our understanding of how children develop language processing strategies. As most of the existing research has emphasized English, the use of Korean will also provide an important contrast for future studies.