Doctoral Dissertation Research: Child and Child-Directed Expression of Possession in a Polysynthetic Language

语言习得研究的科学领域考察了人类经验的一个基本基础：儿童如何说他们的第一语言。几十年来，该领域主要集中在数百万（甚至数十亿）人的语言上，如西班牙语，法语，日语和英语。我们对孩子们如何学会说世界上其他7000种语言中的大多数知之甚少。这些语言中大约有一半面临消失的危险，其中包括所有阿尔冈琴语系，这是北美最大的土著语言群体之一。阿尔冈昆语，如北方东克里语（NEC），与语言习得研究中通常研究的语言有着根本的不同，随着这些语言不再被使用，我们失去了了解儿童如何获得人类基本语言表达能力的机会。本论文项目探讨了儿童如何学习说NEC，在北美仍然由儿童作为第一语言学习的少数几个土著语言之一。该项目分析和改进了Chisasibi儿童语言习得研究（CCLAS）收集的视频/音频记录，本论文还包括与NEC的成人发言者进行的新的实地考察，以更深入地了解语言的工作原理和儿童学习语言时所经历的阶段。本论文项目为科学和社区提供了一系列好处。它将增强NEC的现有文档，包括儿童语音以及成人对儿童的语音，这两种类型在语言文档中代表性不足。这也将扩大语言习得研究的范围，深化语言习得研究的多样性。此外，本论文可以帮助克里社区提供更好的语言评估和言语语言病理学的工具，使孩子们可能有更好的支持他们的旅程成为他们的语言的发言人。最后，本文所产生的文献和描述可以帮助克里语学习者的课程和教材的开发。本文将加强和扩大NEC的文献记录。该项目将创建新的语言文档，并丰富Chisasibi儿童语言习得研究（CCLAS）收集的现有儿童和儿童指导语音录音。本文的重点是第一语言习得的拥有表达，这是一个基本概念，在认知和语言发展。该项目将在两个方面创建和推进语言文档。首先，研究涉及与NEC的成年发言人一起工作，以审查CCLAS录音，并引出和转录成人样的目标。这将产生数小时的转录和注释录音NEC以及独特的元语言评论和分析。第二，这些成人目标，transmittance，启发，分析，评论和注释将被用来丰富现有的CCLAS语料库。这项工作将有助于使CCLAS能够公开提供更多的抄本、注释和媒体文件。通过这项工作，本论文将有助于开拓新的科学领域。例如，本文对语言文献中经常缺失的言语体裁进行了研究，丰富了语言习得研究的范围和类型多样性。该项目还可以提供洞察力，以帮助确保语言评估和言语语言病理学的方法和工具在语言和文化上是不合适的。该研究的结果还可以为课程和教材的创建提供信息，不仅有利于第二语言学习者，还可以满足学校对克里语儿童的母语结构教学的需求。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审查标准进行评估来支持。

The scientific field of language acquisition research examines a basic foundation of the human experience: How children come to speak their first language. For decades the field has largely focused on languages with millions (or even billions) of speakers, such as Spanish, French, Japanese, and English. We know very little about how children learn to speak most of the other 7000 languages around the world. Approximately half of these languages are in danger of disappearing, which includes all of the Algonquian language family, one of the largest groups of indigenous languages in North America. Algonquian languages such as Northern East Cree (NEC) are radically different from those typically studied in language acquisition research, and as these languages cease to be spoken, we lose the chance to understand how children acquire the fundamentally human capacity of linguistic expression. This dissertation project explores how children learn to speak NEC, one of the few remaining indigenous languages in North America still learned by children as a first language. This project analyzes and improves video/audio recordings collected by the Chisasibi Child Language Acquisition Study (CCLAS), and this dissertation also includes new fieldwork with adult speakers of NEC to provide more insight into how the language works and the stages children go through when learning the language. This dissertation project offers a range of benefits for science and for communities. It will enhance existing documentation of NEC and include child speech as well as speech from adults to children, both of which are underrepresented genres in language documentation. It will also expand the purview and deepen the diversity of language acquisition research. Furthermore, this dissertation can help provide Cree communities with better tools for language assessment and speech-language pathology, so that children may have better support on their journey to become speakers of their language. Lastly, the documentation and description generated by this dissertation can help inform the development of curricula and teaching materials for learners of the Cree language.This dissertation will enhance and expand the documentary record of NEC. This project will create new language documentation as well as enrich existing recordings of child and child-directed speech collected by the Chisasibi Child Language Acquisition Study (CCLAS). The focus of this dissertation is the first language acquisition of the expression of possession, which is a fundamental concept in cognitive and linguistic development. This project will create and advance language documentation on two fronts. First, research involves working with adult speakers of NEC to review CCLAS recordings and elicit and transcribe adult-like targets. This will produce hours of transcribed and annotated audio recordings of NEC as well as unique metalinguistic commentary and analysis. Second, these adult targets, transcriptions, elicitations, analysis, commentary, and notes will be used to enrich the existing CCLAS corpus. This work will help enable CCLAS to make additional transcripts, annotations, and media files publicly available. Through this work, this dissertation will help break new scientific ground. For example, this dissertation examines speech genres often absent in language documentation, and it enriches the range and typological diversity of language acquisition research. This project can also provide insight to help ensure that methods and tools in language assessment and speech-language pathology are linguistically and culturally inappropriate. The findings from this research can also inform the creation of curriculum and pedagogical materials to benefit not only second language learners but also meet the needs of schools teaching Cree-speaking children about the structure of their mother tongue.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.