Doctoral Dissertation Research: Acquisition of subject-verb agreement and the role of developing numeracy--A behavioral and electrophysiological study

本论文的目的是加深我们对语言习得与其他认知能力发展之间关系的理解。孩子们学习第一语言似乎毫不费力，而且速度很快。到三岁时，大多数孩子似乎能说出完全符合语法的句子，并且每天能够学习多达十个新单词。语言习得是如何发生的一直是语言研究的驱动问题之一，也是儿童早期发展相关领域的一个重要问题。了解儿童如何习得第一语言对于理解如何学习第二语言至关重要，因此对于理解如何更快地将移民儿童融入美国的英语学校也很重要。这些知识还将使我们能够改进我们的工具包，帮助那些受到语言迟缓或与发育障碍（如特殊语言障碍、唐氏综合症和自闭症谱系障碍）相关的语言障碍挑战的儿童。这个项目着眼于主谓一致的发展，这是语法元素，使我们能够区分“the sheep grazes”和“the sheep graze”，例如。迄今为止的研究表明，孩子们在理解之前就能准确地产生主谓一致。这似乎是一个悖论，因为人们通常认为，儿童在开始说话之前就已经理解了语言结构。本研究将调查说英语的学龄前儿童的大脑是如何处理这一语法特征的，以及孩子们是如何产生和理解这一语法特征的，以建立一个模型，说明他们在3到5岁之间发展这些能力之间的关系。儿童的数字技能也将被测量，以观察他们对数轴的概念是否会影响他们对主谓一致的单复数区分的理解程度，在英语规则动词中，这是用“-s”或没有“-s”标记的。这项论文资助将支持第一个综合方法来调查这个问题的研究，该方法考虑了神经处理、句子的产生和理解，以及认知成熟因素，包括计算技能的成熟。这项研究的结果将帮助我们理解英语儿童的语法发展，并验证一种研究儿童语言发展的方法，这种方法可以扩展到其他语言中，这些语言中同样明显的悖论已经被观察到，包括德语、法语、西班牙语和班图语科萨语。

The goal of this dissertation project is to deepen our understanding of how language acquisition is related to the development of other cognitive abilities. Children seem to learn their first language effortlessly and rapidly. By three years of age, most children appear to speak in fully grammatical sentences and are able to learn up to ten new words every day. How language acquisition happens continues to be one of the driving questions in language research and an important one for all fields related to early childhood development. Knowing how children acquire a first language is crucial for understanding how a second language is learned and therefore is important for understanding how to more quickly integrate immigrant children into English-language schools in the US. This knowledge will also allow us to improve our toolkits for helping children who are challenged by language delays or by language impairments associated with developmental disorders such as Specific Language Impairment, Down Syndrome, and Autism Spectrum Disorders. This project looks at the development of subject-verb agreement, which is the element of grammar that allows us to distinguish between "The sheep grazes" and "The sheep graze", for example. Research to date suggests that children can produce subject-verb agreement accurately before they comprehend it. This appears to be a paradox because it is generally assumed that children understand language structures before they begin to produce them in speech. This study will investigate how English-speaking preschoolers' brains process this grammatical feature, and how well children produce and comprehend it, to develop a model of the relationship between these abilities as they develop between the ages of 3 and 5 years. Children's number skills will also be measured to look at whether their conception of the number line influences how well they comprehend the singular-plural distinction of subject-verb agreement, which is marked on English regular verbs by "-s" or no "-s". This dissertation grant will support the first study to investigate this question with a comprehensive approach that takes into account neural processing, production and comprehension of the sentences, as well as cognitive maturational factors, including maturation of numeracy skills. The results of this study will help us to understand grammatical development in English-speaking children and validate an approach to research on child language development that can be extended to other languages in which the same apparent paradox has been observed, including, German, French, Spanish, and the Bantu language Xhosa.