Doctoral Dissertation Research: Heritage speakers processing of the Spanish subjunctive during online comprehension.

美国有4840万西班牙裔，是说西班牙语人数第二多的国家。这些人中的许多人都是西班牙语的传承者：在说西班牙语的家庭中长大的英语双语者。过去的研究表明，传统语言的语法知识相对于单语西班牙语使用者的语法知识是缺乏的。这个论文项目的目标是为了更好地理解美国传统西班牙语使用者的语法，而不是从这个角度出发。为什么这很重要？说传统语言的人的母语经常受到歧视。然而，充分的证据表明，保持母语是很重要的，因为它是语言最发达的母语，为学习母语和社会语言提供了最好的基础。因此，对传统语言的研究有助于验证通常被公众和学术界所轻视的语言实践。这项计划中的研究考察了西班牙语的一个语法特征，该特征一直被认为被滥用和简化，并显示了西班牙语传统使用者所谓的“侵蚀”：西班牙语虚拟语气。过去的研究依赖于西班牙语虚拟语气在语法上的“正确”和“不正确”的规定性概念，与之不同的是，这里使用的实验材料将反映从一个大语料库中提取的自发产生的语音。本文提出了两个问题：(1)生活在长期双语社区的传统语言使用者对限制西班牙语虚拟语气选择的语言因素（词汇和结构）的敏感程度如何？(2)社会因素在多大程度上调节传统说话人对情绪选择的敏感性？数据将使用听觉瞳孔测量法收集，瞳孔扩张的变化将被用作处理难度的指标。之所以选择瞳孔测量法作为数据收集方法，是因为它在传统语言使用者的语境中具有很高的生态有效性，而传统语言使用者的语言经验主要是口头和听觉。通过使用适当的方法并将语料库数据纳入计划实验的设计中，目标是为传统语言背景下的语言习得和加工理论做出贡献，并提供更充分的解释。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

With 48.4 million people of Hispanic origin, the U.S. is the country with the second largest number of Spanish speakers. Many of these speakers are heritage speakers of Spanish: English bilingual speakers who are raised in homes where Spanish is spoken. Past studies have characterized grammatical knowledge in the heritage language as deficient relative to grammatical knowledge in monolingual speakers of Spanish. The goal of this dissertation project is to move away from this perspective in order to better understand the grammars of heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S. Why is this important? The home language of heritage speakers is often stigmatized. However, ample evidence suggests that maintaining the home language is important because it is the most linguistically-developed parental language and provides the best foundation for learning both a home language and a societal language. Therefore, the study of heritage languages contributes to the validation of language practices that are commonly looked down upon by the general public and the academic community.The planned study examines a grammatical feature of Spanish that has been argued to be misused and simplified, and to display so-called "erosion" by heritage speakers of Spanish: the Spanish subjunctive. Unlike past research that has relied on prescriptive notions of what is grammatically "correct" and "incorrect" in the use of the Spanish subjunctive, the experimental materials employed here will mirror spontaneously produced speech extracted from a large corpus. Two questions are addressed: (1) To what degree are heritage speakers who live in a long-standing bilingual community sensitive to the linguistic factors (lexical and structural) constraining the selection of the Spanish subjunctive?, and (2) To what degree do social factors modulate heritage speakers’ sensitivity to mood selection? Data will be collected using auditory pupillometry, and changes in pupil dilation will be used an as an index of processing difficulty. Pupillometry was selected as the method of data collection because of its high ecological validity in the context of heritage speakers, whose language experience in the heritage language is mostly oral and aural. By using an appropriate methodology and by incorporating corpus data in the design of the planned experiments, the goal is to contribute to a theory of language acquisition and processing in heritage language contexts with greater explanatory adequacy.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.