Doctoral Dissertation Research: Processing garden paths across dialects: A study of African American English

美国是一个庞大的多文化和多语言人口的家园。许多说英语的人每天都要接触不同的语言和不同种类的英语。很多研究都致力于了解说多种语言的人如何利用他们的多种语言知识在语境中解释语言。但人们对掌握一种语言的不同变体（“方言”）的人是如何做到这一点的却知之甚少。在本论文项目中，研究人员调查了非裔美国人语言（AAL），这是一种主要由非裔美国人使用的英语，但并非完全由非裔美国人使用。这项研究调查了说AAL的人是如何理解使用AAL语言特征的句子的，这些特征在美国主流英语（MAE）中有，而在美国主流英语（MAE）中没有，MAE是美国各地使用的“标准”方言。AAL和MAE有明显的重叠，但在特定的语法结构上两者是不同的。这个项目调查了AAL使用者在不同语境中何时以及如何使用这些方言特定结构。研究说AAL的人是如何利用语境来做到这一点的，将有助于我们了解语言处理是如何在更自然的语境中进行的，也将有助于我们了解美国相当一部分人所说的各种英语的使用情况。几十年来，对歧义句子的理解一直是心理语言学研究的核心内容。这方面的经典例证是“花园路径效应”，即当歧义句子被消除为不太可能的句法结构时，理解者会遇到处理困难。这是因为理解者在处理语言输入时，会主动预测可能出现的句法延续，而当这些预测被证明是错误的时候，就会出现困难。理解者做出的预测会受到多种因素的影响，比如词频、合理性、语法知识，甚至说话者的社会特征。目前的研究使用花园路径效应作为一个窗口，了解AAL使用者在语言处理过程中的句法预期。具体来说，这个项目使用视觉世界眼动追踪来调查这些说话者如何使用说话者的声音和其他方言特定语法特征等因素来调整他们对句子结构的预测。要研究的具体结构是联系主语关系从句现象。在AAL中，有可能出现这样的句子：“Sally是那个给她妈妈发了一封信的人”，其中“who”是可选的。相反，在MAE中，“who”是必需的。通过调查在这样的句子中，说AAL的人是把Sally理解为信的发送者还是信的接收者，研究人员将能够测量说话者在不同语境中对这种结构的预期程度。这项研究将有助于增加关于语境因素（例如说话人的声音）如何影响正在进行的语言处理的文献，并为心理语言学文献增加关键的多样性。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。

The United States is home to a large multi-cultural and multi-lingual population. Many speakers interact with different languages and different varieties of English daily. A lot of research has been devoted to understanding how speakers of multiple languages, multilinguals, use their knowledge of multiple languages to interpret language in context. But less is known about how speakers who know different varieties of a single language ('dialects') accomplish this. In this dissertation project, the researchers investigate African American Language (AAL), a variety of English spoken primarily, but not exclusively, by African Americans. The research investigates how speakers of AAL understand sentences that use linguistic features that are present in AAL but not present in Mainstream American English (MAE), the 'standard' dialect spoken across the US. AAL and MAE overlap significantly, but there are specific grammatical constructions where the two diverge. This project investigates when and how AAL speakers use these dialect-specific constructions in different contexts. Research into how AAL speakers use context to do this will shed light onto how language processing proceeds in more naturalistic contexts, and will also shed light into the usage of a variety of English spoken by a significant portion of the United States' population.The comprehension of ambiguous sentences has been a central component of psycholinguistic research for many decades. The classic demonstration of this is the 'garden path effect', the finding that comprehenders encounter processing difficulty when ambiguous sentences are disambiguated towards an unlikely syntactic structure. This happens because comprehenders make active predictions about what syntactic continuations are likely as they process linguistic input, with difficulty occurring when those predictions turn out to be incorrect. The predictions comprehenders make can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as word frequency, plausibility, grammatical knowledge, and even social features of the speaker. The current study uses garden path effects as a window into what syntactic expectations AAL speakers have during language processing. Specifically, this project employs visual-world eye-tracking to investigate how these speakers use factors such as speaker voice and the presence of other dialect-specific grammatical features to adjust their predictions about how a sentence is structured. The specific structure to be investigated is the phenomenon of contact subject relative clauses. In AAL, it is possible to have sentence such as "Sally is the one (who) sent a letter to her mom" where the "who" is optional. In MAE, in contrast, "who" is required. By investigating whether AAL speakers interpret Sally as the sender of the letter or receiver of the letter in a sentence like this, the researchers will be able to measure how much speakers anticipate this construction in different contexts. This research will help add to growing literature on how contextual factors (e.g., speaker voice) influence on-going linguistic processing as well as adding critical diversity to the psycholinguistic literature.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.