Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Acquisition of Verbal Morphology in a Polysynthetic Language

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。孩子生命的头几年是在从混乱的母语中创造秩序，母语是一种高度复杂的信号，由有限数量的声音组成，以无限数量的形式排列成大量的单词。本论文的研究旨在确定儿童如何在具有高效词干交替和等级对齐的高度连接语言中梳理声音，语法和文化之间的相互作用，以掌握复杂的言语形态。这是第一次全面描述任何属于其家族的语言的习得。这一分析将对儿童如何内化、塑造和再现语言知识产生独特的见解，这对语言学、认知科学和发展心理学领域以及我们对人类语言能力的更广泛理解具有重要意义。本研究采用纵向和横断面相结合的方法，对三名2岁以下儿童的自然语言进行了调查；0和4；在12个月的时间里描述它们的形态发育。在与母语人士的密切合作下，录制的录音将被转录、翻译并编码为儿童和成人语言的结构特征，以方便儿童制作、儿童引导的语言和儿童听到的成人-成人话语的比较。定性分析将包括哪些语素与哪些动词词干一起出现，以及语素生产力。定量分析将包括平均话语长度，每小时的话语总数，以及每个动词词干和词缀的频率。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。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).The first few years of a child's life are spent creating order out of the chaos of her native language, a highly complex signal comprised of a finite number of sounds arranged into an enormous number of words in an infinite number of configurations. This dissertation research seeks to determine how children tease apart the interactions among sound, grammar, and culture to master the intricacies of verbal morphology in a highly concatenative language with productive stem alternation and hierarchical alignment. It is the first holistic description of the acquisition of any language belonging to its family. This analysis will yield unique insight into how children internalize, shape, and reproduce linguistic knowledge, which has significant implications for the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and developmental psychology, as well as for our broader understanding of the human language faculty.Using a combined longitudinal and cross-sectional approach, this study will investigate the naturalistic speech of three children between 2;0 and 4;0 over the course of 12 months to describe their morphological development. In close collaboration with a native speaker, the recordings made will be transcribed, translated, and coded for the structural characteristics of child and adult speech to facilitate the comparison of child productions, child-directed speech, and adult-adult discourse overheard by the child. Qualitative analyses will include which morphemes occur with which verb stems, as well as morpheme productivity. Quantitative analyses will include Mean Length of Utterance, total number of utterances per hour, and frequencies of each verb stem and affix.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.