Doctoral Dissertation Research: Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Raising

像(I)男孩在女孩看来很快乐这样的句子是不寻常的，因为男孩的主语被理解为与形容词快乐联系在一起，尽管两者相距很远。这样的句子被称为提升句，因为这种联系被认为是由于主语(提升)从离形容词更近的位置移动而产生的。与此相比，(Ii)在女孩看来，男孩是快乐的，主题发生在最初的(未被抬起的)位置。以前的研究表明，孩子们很难理解像(I)这样的提升句，但像(II)这样的非提升句却不是。这篇论文的研究调查了困难的来源是否可以被简化为一个被称为“干预”的加工因素--一个名词短语(女孩)的存在，它介于被试和它移动的位置之间。包括宾语关系从句、宾语wh-疑问句等在内的许多结构中都观察到了干预效应。首先，它纠正了当前方法中以前未被注意到的缺陷，从而更好地了解了儿童在抚养方面的能力。其次，它解释了儿童举起困难的原因，它利用了一种现象(干预)，这种现象概括了多种结构，从而减少了观察到的提高到人类语言处理的更一般方面的困难。本研究的结果将使我们能够评估和比较三种不同的理论来解释语言习得和成人句子加工领域的干预效应。本研究将通过五个实验来考察儿童S的理解受到以下因素的影响：(1)提升结构中插入名词的存在，(2)插入名词的类型(词汇/代词)，(3)主语的位置(提升的和未提升的)。这篇论文是跨学科的，将习得、句法和加工三个不同的子领域结合在一起。此外，本文所采用的方法有可能推广到更多的人群，如二语英语学习者和说其他语言的人，这些语言允许跨越另一个名词短语进行提升。

Sentences like (i) the boy seems to the girl to be happy are unusual because the subject the boy is understood as being associated with the adjective happy despite the two being distant from each other. Such sentences are referred to as 'raising' sentences because this association is thought to arise from movement of the subject (raising) from a location closer to the adjective. Compare this to (ii) it seems to the girl that the boy is happy, where the subject occurs in its original (unraised) position. Previous research has shown that children have difficulty understanding raising sentences like (i), but not an unraised sentence like (ii). This dissertation research investigates whether the source of difficulty might be reduced to a processing factor referred to as 'intervention' -- the presence of a noun phrase (the girl) intervening between the subject and the location from which it moved. Intervention effects have been observed in many structures that involve such moved elements, including object relative clauses, object wh-questions, etc. The goal of this dissertation is twofold. First, it corrects previously unnoticed flaws in current methodologies, and thus provides a better picture of children's abilities with respect to raising. Second, it offers an explanation for children's difficulty with raising that draws on a phenomenon (intervention) that generalizes across multiple constructions, thereby reducing the observed difficulties with raising to a more general facet of human language processing. The results of this work will allow us to evaluate and compare three different theories that have been proposed to explain intervention effects in the fields of language acquisition and adult sentence processing.Five experiments will be conducted to investigate how children?s comprehension is affected by (i) the presence of an intervening noun in raising structures, (ii) the type of intervening noun (lexical/pronominal), and (iii) the position of the subject (raised and unraised). This dissertation is interdisciplinary in bringing together three different subfields: acquisition, syntax and processing. Furthermore, the approach adopted in this dissertation has the potential to be extended to a variety of additional populations such as L2 learners of English and speakers of other languages that permit raising across another noun phrase.