Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating theories of the over-production of subject pronouns in bilinguals

孩子们必须掌握的一项基本技能是用语言来指代周围的人和物的能力。像“他”和“她”这样的代词主语是通用的语言手段，用于指代先前话语中提到或暗示的人。代词允许说话者避免冗余或重复，从而使语言更经济。与此同时，在语篇中追踪指称物的能力随着时间的推移而发展。儿童如何学会解释和适当地使用这些指称手段是语言习得研究的一个中心问题，特别是因为掌握代词主语需要到青春期。在使用类型不同但句法相似的语言的儿童中，研究这种能力对于理解儿童和青少年语言和认知发展的互补作用至关重要。本项目旨在研究学龄单语和双语儿童代词主语表达的习得和发展，以评估双语人群潜在的发展迟缓，并研究父母的语言选择如何影响儿童的语言行为。200名6至13岁的儿童将与90名成年人（一半是单语者，一半是同时学习两种语言的双语者）进行比较。将对双语人口进行测试，以评估在一个双语稳定和少数语言教育制度健全的社会中，在社会政治上多数语言和少数语言的习得差异。儿童的理解和生产将通过口头生产和理解任务来衡量。由于研究的两种语言都是无主体语言，因此研究结果将有助于评估双语文献中主体过剩的两个相互竞争的解释——跨语言影响与认知负荷——这也是句法习得的核心问题。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。

A fundamental skill that children must acquire is the ability to use language to refer to people and objects around them. Pronominal subjects like ‘he’ and ‘she’ are universal linguistic devices used to refer to a person mentioned or implied in previous discourse. Pronouns allow speakers to avoid redundancy or repetition, thus making languages more economical. At the same time, the ability to track referents in discourse develops over time. How children learn to interpret and appropriately use these referential devices is a central question in language acquisition research, particularly because mastering pronominal subjects takes up to adolescence. Studying this ability in the bilingual development of children who speak typologically different but syntactically similar languages in the way pronouns are expressed is critical to understand the complementing roles of linguistic and cognitive development in children and adolescents. This project investigates the acquisition and development of pronominal subject expression in school-age monolingual and bilingual children in order to assess potential developmental delays in bilingual populations and to examine how parents’ linguistic choices may influence children’s linguistic behavior. 200 children ages 6 to 13 will be compared to 90 adults (half monolinguals, half bilinguals who simultaneously acquired two languages). The bilingual population will be tested to evaluate the acquisitional differences of the socio-politically majority language and the minority language in a society with stable bilingualism and a strong education system in the minority language. Children’s comprehension and production will be measured through oral production and comprehension tasks. Because the pair of languages studied are null subject languages, the results will contribute to evaluate two competing accounts of subject over-production in the bilingual literature ––crosslinguistic influence versus cognitive load–– that are also central questions in the acquisition of syntax.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.