Doctoral Dissertation Research: Children's Awareness of Syntactic Ambiguity

识字教育是一个国家重要的话题，因为一个国家成年人口的阅读技能影响着他们的生产力和经济进步。阅读困难的成年人通常从孩提时代起就开始阅读。因此，探索在早期阅读成功的所有技能是至关重要的。这项研究考察了儿童对歧义的意识，这是一种有助于阅读的语言技能。在孩子们学习了单词中字母与发音的对应之后，他们开始阅读句子和课文。意识到一个句子何时有多重含义，有助于读者利用上下文线索将该句子整合到整个文本中。然而，许多孩子都在为此而苦苦挣扎。根据国家教育统计中心的数据，只有46%的三年级学生能够使用上下文线索来理解课文的意思。由于歧义检测会影响文本理解，因此能否通过训练来提高歧义理解能力的问题非常重要。关注歧义句子可以补充早期的识字课程，并为有困难的读者提供干预技巧。这项心理语言学研究探索了儿童对句法歧义的意识，如这句话所示：“男孩用双筒望远镜看到了女孩。”如果介词短语“用双筒望远镜”修饰动词“saw”，那么这句话的意思是男孩用双筒望远镜看女孩。如果它修饰了名词短语“the Girl”，那么这句话的意思是男孩看到了拿着望远镜的女孩。这两个句子的意义有很大的不同，检测这种歧义会影响文本的理解。该项目的其中一项研究是调查学龄前儿童是否有意识地意识到这样一个句子有多重含义。第二项研究是关于是否可以通过几周的简单训练来提高歧义意识。第二项研究还考察了歧义检测能力的提高和阅读准备程度的提高之间的相关性。本研究为儿童语言知识的研究提供了新的数据，促进了语言发展的研究。这也与一项关于句子处理的研究有关，该研究表明，儿童比成年人依赖更少类型的信息。

Literacy education is a topic of national importance because the reading skills of a nation's adult population affect their productivity and economic advancement. Adults who struggle with reading often have done so since early childhood. Thus, it is essential to probe all skills that lead to reading success at an early age. This research examines children's awareness of ambiguity, a linguistic skill that contributes to reading. After children learn letter-sound correspondences in words, they begin reading sentences and texts. Awareness of when a sentence has multiple meanings helps the reader integrate the sentence into the whole text using context cues. Many children struggle with this, however. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 46% of third-graders are able to use context cues to derive meaning from a text. Because ambiguity detection influences text comprehension, the question of whether it can be improved with training is important. Focus on ambiguous sentences could supplement early literacy curriculum and inform intervention techniques for struggling readers. This psycholinguistic research explores children's awareness of syntactic ambiguity, as illustrated in this sentence: "The boy saw the girl with binoculars." If the prepositional phrase "with binoculars" modifies the verb "saw," then this sentence means that the boy used binoculars to see the girl. If it modifies the noun phrase "the girl," the sentence means that the boy saw the girl who has the binoculars. The two sentence meanings have very different meanings, and detecting such ambiguity influences text comprehension. One of the studies in this project investigates whether pre-school children are consciously aware that such a sentence has multiple meanings. The second study asks whether ambiguity awareness can be improved with simple training over a period of a few weeks. The second study also examines correlations between improvement in ambiguity detection and improvements on measures of reading readiness. This research advances the study of language development with new data on children's linguistic knowledge. It is also relevant to a body of research on sentence processing suggesting that children rely on fewer types of information than adults do.