Collaborative Research: Cross-Linguistic Investigations of the Acquisition of Subject-Verb Agreement

主谓一致在许多语言中普遍存在，是儿童最早必须掌握的句法关系之一。先前的研究表明，不同语言的习得过程是不同的：在英语、西班牙语和科萨语（班图语）中，可以观察到早期产生但较晚理解，而在法语中，产生和理解都是早期的（到30个月大）。这个合作项目中的pi，勒让德博士和巴里埃博士，试图通过评估假设来调和这些结果，即儿童可以更好、更早地在这些标记既感知显著又语义透明的语言中发现一致标记。该研究项目将选择四种语言作为目标，因为它们的相关属性允许将许多因素分开：英语，西班牙语，法语和海地克里奥尔语。本项目在探索感知因素在句子层面和跨语言层面的作用方面具有创新性，并通过融合理论句法、心理语言学、语料库分析和语音感知的研究，并结合各自的研究方法，促进语言习得研究的跨学科方法。该项目将促进美国的pi和法国的研究顾问之间的国际合作，并将为博士后研究员、美国两个研究中心的研究生和本科生提供宝贵的研究经验。

Subject-verb agreement is pervasive in many languages and it is one of the earliest syntactic relations that children must master. Prior research has suggested that its course of acquisition is different in different languages: early production but late comprehension have been observed in English, Spanish and Xhosa (Bantu) while production and comprehension are both early in French (by 30 months of age). The PIs in this collaborative project, Dr. Legendre and Dr. Barriere, seek to reconcile these results by evaluating the hypothesis that children can detect agreement markers better and earlier in languages in which these markers are both perceptually salient and semantically transparent. The research project will target four languages chosen because their relevant properties allow a number of factors to be teased apart: English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole. This project is innovative in seeking to investigate the role of perceptual factors, both at the sentential level and cross-linguistically, and fosters interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language acquisition by melding research in theoretical syntax, psycholinguistics, corpus analysis, and speech perception, and combining their respective research methods. The project will stimulate international collaborations between the PIs in the US and research consultants in France, and will provide valuable research experience for a post-doctoral researcher, and for graduate and undergraduate students at the two US sites.