Doctoral Dissertation Research: Who breaked the rule? Rethinking English Past Tense Overregularizations

为了学习一门语言，孩子们必须超越简单地模仿说话，从他们周围的语言环境中学习语言的规则。判断孩子学习规则的一种方法是，他们将规则应用于过于宽泛的词汇。例如，学英语的孩子在3岁左右会产生像“broken”或“caught”这样的形式。这些形式被称为过去时过度规则化，表明孩子们已经含蓄地发现了过去时的形成规则：即“在动词后面加-ed来形成过去时”。但是孩子们要到3岁才能发现这些规则吗？更好地理解规则发现的时间线将有助于我们制定更现实的里程碑来衡量儿童在第一语言学习方面的进展。这也将有助于我们理解为什么过去时形式对英语第二语言学习者来说如此困难，并为这些学习者提供更明智的教学干预。这项工作有两个目标：第一个是寻找过去时规则可以在16个月大的婴儿中发现的证据，这将与许多观察结果一致，即儿童在他们的生产能力达到相同水平之前很久就表现出显著的接受能力。第二个目标是确定过去时过度正则化的产生是否可以用语法规则发现以外的因素来解释。越来越多的证据表明，生产中的过度规范化反映了儿童在试图说出越来越复杂的句子时需要简化他们的话语。可能影响儿童需要简化话语的因素是词汇项目的频率和儿童的年龄。该计划将结合对16个月大婴儿的行为研究和纵向的、自发的儿童语言的语料库分析来实现这些目标。

To learn a language, children must go beyond simply imitating speech and learn the rules of the language from their surrounding linguistic environment. One way to tell that children learn rules is that they apply rules to an overly broad set of words. For example, English-learning children produce forms like "breaked" or "catched" at around 3 years of age. These forms, called past tense overregularizations, show that children have implicitly discovered the past tense formation rule: namely, "add -ed to a verb to create the past tense." But does it take children until age 3 to discover such rules? A better understanding of the timeline of rule discovery will help us to develop more realistic milestones to measure children's progress in first language learning. It will also help to us understand why the past tense form is so difficult for second language learners of English and allow more informed pedagogical intervention for these learners.This work has two goals: the first is to seek evidence that the past tense rule can be found in 16-month-olds, which would be consistent with many observations that children display significant receptive abilities long before their productive abilities reach the same level. The second goal is to determine if the production of past tense overregularizations can be explained by factors other than the discovery of a grammatical rule. There is growing evidence that overregularizations in production reflect children's need to simplify their utterances as they attempt to say more and more complex sentences. Factors that may influence a child's need to simplify utterances are frequency of the lexical item and the child's age. The proposed project will combine a behavioral study with 16-month-olds and a corpus analysis of longitudinal, spontaneous child speech to achieve these goals.