Doctoral Dissertation Research - Acquisition of Questions in Bulgarian and English

在NSF语言学计划和国际科学与工程办公室的支持下，本论文项目将调查保加利亚和英国儿童的语言发展，重点是问题的发展。说英语的年轻儿童在wh疑问句(由What和Where等词启动)上表现出相对较长的发展时期，尽管他们的输入是一致和完美的。常见错误是未包括辅助器或在辅助器存在时未将其反转。这些错误的来源仍不得而知。在弗吉尼亚·瓦利安的指导下，Lidiya Tornyova将使用引出的模仿任务和自然观察相结合的方式，比较说保加利亚语和英语的2-3岁儿童对是/否和wh-疑问句的习得。这项研究将涉及三个广泛的研究问题：1)跨语言差异在习得语法结构的过程中起什么作用？2)语言结构属性的规律性在多大程度上决定了语言习得的时间-过程和性质？3)两个独立领域--疑问句形成和公开主语使用--规律性分布的差异如何影响语言学习？我们预测，保加利亚语和英语在疑问句构成上的差异将使我们在保加利亚语中更容易获得wh-疑问句。我们假设wh-疑问句中的显性主语产生将反映目标语的要求。由于保加利亚语是一种无主语的语言，我们预测儿童会比说英语的儿童更多地遗漏主题。研究将从跨语言的角度考察问题的发展，从而增加我们对问题发展的理解。关于是/否和问句习得的数据大多来自英语。目前尚不清楚从英语发展而来的主张和假设是否可以扩展到保加利亚语等语言，这些语言在重要属性上与英语不同。研究保加利亚问题的发展也将有助于评估当前英语语言习得研究提出的相互矛盾的主张和假设。这项研究将是保加利亚人句法习得的第一次调查。在更广泛的意义上，该项目将有助于建立关于保加利亚早期习得的合作研究。Lidiya Tornyova将与保加利亚索非亚大学斯拉夫研究助理教授Krassimira Petrova博士合作。该项目将向Childes数据库提供保加利亚成人与儿童自发对话的录音和转录，创建首个保加利亚儿童语言在线语料库。

With support from the NSF Linguistics Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering this dissertation project will investigate language development in young Bulgarian and English children, concentrating on the development of questions. Young English-speaking children show a relatively protracted period of development in wh-questions (initiated by words like what and where), even though their input is uniform and perfect. The common errors are failure to include an auxiliary or failure to invert an auxiliary when it is present. The source of these errors is still unknown. Under the direction of Virginia Valian, Lidiya Tornyova will compare acquisition of both yes/no and wh-questions by 2- to 3-year-old Bulgarian- and English-speaking children, using an elicited imitation task in combination with natural observation. The study will address three broad research questions: 1) What is the role of cross-linguistic differences in the process of acquiring grammatical structures? 2) To what extent does the regularity of a language's structural properties determine the time-course and nature of its acquisition? 3) How do the differences in the distribution of regularity in two independent domains - question formation and overt subject use - affect language learning? The differences in question formation in Bulgarian and English will, we predict, make wh-questions easier to acquire in Bulgarian. We hypothesize that overt subject production in wh-questions will reflect requirements of the target language. Since Bulgarian is a null-subject language, we predict children will omit subjects more often than English-speaking children will.The research will increase our understanding of the development of questions by examining acquisition from a cross-linguistic perspective. Most of the data on yes/no and wh-question acquisition are from English. It is not known whether claims and hypotheses developed from English can be extended to languages, such as Bulgarian, which differ in important properties from English. Studying the development of Bulgarian questions will also help assess current contradictory claims and hypotheses proposed by studies on English language acquisition. The study will be the first investigation of Bulgarian acquisition of syntax. In a broader sense, the project will help establish collaborative research on early acquisition of Bulgarian. Lidiya Tornyova will collaborate with Dr. Krassimira Petrova, Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. The project will contribute recordings and transcriptions of Bulgarian spontaneous adult-child conversations to the CHILDES data bank, creating the first on-line corpus of Bulgarian child language.