Doctoral Dissertation Research: Literacy Effects on Language Acquisition and Sentence Processing in Adult L1 and School-Age Heritage Speakers of Spanish

在今天美国学校的许多英语学习者（ELLs）中，大约75%的人将西班牙语作为母语。这代表了近400万在家里说西班牙语而在学校用英语上学的儿童。这些儿童所接触的语言差异是可能导致学龄期ELLs与单语英语同龄人之间持续存在成就差距的一个可能因素。研究调查双语语言发展如何在学龄期的进展是非常必要的，以了解影响语言发展的因素在这个年龄段，并制定促进语言的增长和所有学习者的学业成功的计划。与历史上的“只讲英语”的方法相反，最近的证据表明，为英语学习者提供第一和第二语言的学术培训会带来更好的结果。然而，尚不清楚发展的哪些具体方面有助于这一观察，以及它们对成年的长期影响可能是什么。本研究旨在探讨母语读写能力对英语学习者口语理解能力的影响。本研究从心理语言学的角度探讨读写能力在学龄期英语学习者语言发展中的作用。它测试了识字增强假设，该假设声称学习阅读和写作通过加强个人更有效地监测形态结构的能力来提高语言理解能力。语言学的重点是西班牙语中名词和分词上的性别和数字标记，因为这些标记通常是跟踪复杂句子中所指对象的重要线索，例如被动句，这在书面语中比口语中更常见。在某些情况下，成功地解释（IM）似是而非的被动句在西班牙语需要听众参加动词和它的对象之间的形态句法协议的依赖关系。研究1测试9-10岁的讲西班牙语的儿童（一半在双语学校，一半在英语学校），研究2测试低到高识字的讲西班牙语的成年人。这两项研究包括两个相同的实验。一项实验使用视觉世界眼动追踪技术来测量学习西班牙语读写如何影响这些说话者在被动句中使用过去分词上的性别标记来预测句子对象的能力。另一个实验使用事件相关电位（ERP）来测量大脑对相似句子中关键词的反应差异是否表明识字如何影响听觉句子处理过程中句法和语义信息的使用。研究结果将有助于提高对识字和语言知识之间相互作用的理解，以及这种相互作用如何影响儿童和成人双语者的口语理解中涉及的认知过程，这些双语者具有不同的学术语言接触和母语经验。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响进行评估来支持审查标准。

Of the many English Language Learners (ELLs) in American schools today, roughly 75% speak Spanish as their native language. This represents nearly four million children who speak Spanish at home while attending school in English. The linguistic variation that these children are exposed to is one possible factor that may contribute to the persistent achievement gap between school-age ELLs and their monolingual, English-speaking peers. Research that investigates how bilingual language development progresses during the school-age period is critically needed to understand the factors that affect language development at this age and to develop programs that facilitate linguistic growth and academic success in all learners. Contrary to historical 'English-only' approaches, recent evidence suggests that providing ELLs with academic training in their first and second language leads to better outcomes in both languages. However, it is less clear what specific aspects of development contribute to this observation and what their long-term effects into adulthood may be. This study investigates the impact of literacy in ELLs' first language as one important component of school-age development that may enhance the ability to comprehend oral language. The findings of this study will have important consequences for young ELLs, who commonly acquire reading and writing skills in their second language.This project takes a psycholinguistic perspective to investigate the role of literacy in the language development of school-age ELLs. It tests the Literacy Enhancement Hypothesis, which claims learning to read and write improves language comprehension by strengthening an individual's ability to more efficiently monitor morphological structures. The linguistic focus is gender and number markers on nouns and participles in Spanish because these are often important cues for tracking referents in complex sentences, such as passives, which are more frequent in written than in spoken language. In some cases, successfully interpreting (im)plausible passive sentences in Spanish requires listeners to attend to morphosyntactic agreement dependencies between the verb and its object. Study 1 tests 9-10 year old Spanish-speaking children (half in dual language, half in English only schools) and Study 2 tests low to high literate Spanish-speaking adults. Both studies include two identical experiments. One experiment uses visual world eye tracking techniques to measure how learning to read and write in Spanish affects these speakers' ability to use gender markers on past participles in passives sentences to anticipate the object of a sentence. The other experiment uses event related potentials (ERPs) to measure if differences in brain responses to critical words in similar sentences indicate how literacy impacts the use of syntactic and semantic information during auditory sentence processing. The findings will help improve understanding of the interaction between literacy and linguistic knowledge, and how this interaction impacts cognitive processes involved in oral language comprehension in child and adult bilinguals with different academic language exposure and experience in their native language.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.