Doctoral Dissertation Research: Psycholinguistic Studies of Prepositions in English and Icelandic

本论文对英语和冰岛语儿童和成人的介词进行了比较。一些介词表现得像虚词（“to”和“of”），而另一些更像实义词（“in”和“on”）。当幼儿说出这些词时，对自然语言的研究发现了由开始和错误区分的类型。儿童早期句子中缺失的功能元素的一般模式，这种模式在不同语言中有着有趣的变化，可能反映了语言表征或这些表征的处理方面的局限性。本文从理解和生产两个方面进行了实验研究，以期对这些不同的说法进行比较。冰岛语用词尾来表示所研究的英语用介词所表示的信息。因此，英语和冰岛语的发展同等学习者的表现是不同的。语言产生的标准模型得到了正常功能和受损成年人的自然和实验数据的充分检验。但是，从这些模型中得出的发展预测很少得到阐明或验证。同样，儿童最早的话语也经常使用语料库分析工具进行研究。实验很少关注使用不连贯的说话者的功能元素。因此，这项研究在方法上是不同寻常的。它也有可能应用于受损人群。我们对早期语言产生的了解越详细，我们就越能在这些人群中区分正常和非正态错误。最后，冰岛语部分将加强亚利桑那大学和冰岛大学语言习得实验室之间的伙伴关系。在雷克雅未克期间，联合pi尼古拉斯将为培训对心理语言学感兴趣的教师和学生做出贡献。这将为研究冰岛语言变异的冰岛语言学家拓宽经验选择。

This dissertation project compares prepositions in English-speaking and Icelandic-speaking children and adults. Some prepositions behave like function words ("to" and "of"), and others more like content words ("in" and "on"). While young children produce these words, research on natural speech finds the types differentiated by onset and errors. The general pattern of function elements missing from children's early sentences, a pattern with intriguing variation across languages, could reflect limitations either in linguistic representations or in the processing of those representations. The dissertation experiments probe both comprehension and production in order to compare these different accounts. Icelandic uses word endings to indicate the information that English does with the prepositions under investigation. Developmentally equivalent learners of English and Icelandic are therefore expected to perform differently.Standard models of language production are well tested by natural and experimental data from normally functioning and impaired adults. But developmental predictions from these models are rarely articulated or tested. Likewise, children's earliest utterances are more often studied with the tools of corpus analysis. Experiments rarely focus on function elements in speakers who use them inconsistently. This research is thus methodologically unusual. It also has potential application to impaired populations. The more detailed our understanding of early language production, the better we will be able to distinguish normal from non-normal error in such populations. Finally, the Icelandic component will enhance the partnership between language acquisition laboratories at the University of Arizona and the University of Iceland. While in Reykjavik, co-PI Nicholas will contribute to training faculty and students there who are newly interested in psycholinguistics. This will broaden the empirical options for Icelandic linguists who are studying variation in their language.