Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding how minority dialect-speaking children use inflectional verb morphology in sentence processing and word learning.

本博士论文项目研究5-10岁少数民族和多数民族方言儿童的方言差异对句子加工和单词学习的影响。方言是受规则支配的语言系统，但不同方言的语言特征往往不同。人们研究了少数民族社区使用的方言，因为它可能会导致少数民族学生和多数民族学生之间长期存在的学习成绩差距。一种说法是，少数民族方言和教学方言之间的语言差异导致方言不匹配，从而使课堂学习更加困难。然而，目前尚不清楚说少数民族方言与学习成绩之间的关系，因为工作主要是相关的。本研究通过使用对句子理解和语言学习敏感的措施来调查具体机制来解决这一差距。由于课堂教学的主要方法是通过口语，因此了解说方言的少数民族儿童如何使用他们方言的规则来理解学校中更常见的多数方言句子是至关重要的。这些结果提高了我们对方言不匹配如何影响实时学习的理解，同时为支持说不同方言和语言的儿童口语理解和学习的新策略创造了途径。本研究通过两个实验考察了少数民族和多数民族方言儿童是如何利用不同方言的主谓一致来处理多数民族方言句子并进行推理学习新词的。研究小组之前完成的一项研究表明，少数民族方言儿童利用他们对少数民族方言的语法知识来理解由于语言差异而模糊的多数方言句子。然而，缺乏对理解的实时测量提出了额外的问题，即儿童依赖于什么线索来解释句子以及它与学习的关系。实验1验证了方言错配对少数方言儿童使用与多数方言不同的方言特征加工句子的影响。该实验使用眼球追踪任务来评估少数民族方言儿童如何在模棱两可的多数方言句子中使用主谓一致（如was/were）来推断主语数。实验2验证了儿童的语言知识会影响他们如何使用主谓一致来推断新词的假设。本实验使用了一个包含多数方言和少数方言之间不同的形态学特征（如was/were， is/are）的动词学习范式，以检验多数和少数方言儿童使用形态学作为线索推断新词的方式是否存在差异。从以往的研究结果来看，少数民族方言儿童在加工多数方言句子时，应该利用其掌握的少数民族方言语法知识来指导推理。通过对少数民族方言儿童的研究，研究人员评估了具有不同语言经验的儿童如何处理句子，以及语言变化如何影响儿童在处理熟悉和不熟悉方言的句子时所注意的线索。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 doctoral dissertation project investigates how dialect differences between minority and majority dialect-speaking children 5-10 years of age impact sentence processing and word learning. Dialects are rule-governed linguistic systems, yet linguistic features often differ across dialects. Dialects spoken by minority communities have been studied for its potential contribution to longstanding academic performance gaps between minority and majority students. One suggestion is that linguistic differences between a minority dialect and the dialect of instruction lead to a dialect mismatch that makes learning more difficult in the classroom. However, it remains unclear how speaking a minority dialect is related to academic performance because the work is primarily correlational. This study addresses that gap by investigating specific mechanisms using measures that are sensitive to sentence comprehension and language learning. Since the primary method of instruction in the classroom is through oral language, it is essential to understand how minority dialect-speaking children use the rules of their dialect to understand majority dialect sentences of the type more commonly found in schools. These results improve our understanding of how dialect mismatch impacts learning in real time while creating avenues for new strategies that can support spoken language comprehension and learning for children who speak different dialects and languages. The current research uses two experiments to investigate how minority and majority dialect-speaking children use subject-verb agreement, which differs between the dialects, to process majority dialect sentences and make inferences to learn new words. A previous study completed by the research team demonstrates that minority dialect-speaking children use their grammatical knowledge of their minority dialect to comprehend majority dialect sentences that were ambiguous due to linguistic differences. However, the absence of real-time measures of comprehension raises additional questions about what cues children rely on for sentence interpretation and how it relates to learning. Experiment 1 tests the hypothesis that dialect mismatch impacts how minority dialect-speaking children use dialect features marked differently than a majority dialect to process sentences. The experiment uses an eye-tracking task to evaluate how minority dialect-speaking children use subject-verb agreement (e.g., was/were) to infer the subject number in ambiguous majority dialect sentences. Experiment 2 tests the hypothesis that children’s language knowledge will shape how they use subject-verb agreement to make inferences about new words. The experiment uses a verb learning paradigm containing morphological features (e.g., was/were, is/are) that differ between the majority and minority dialect to examine if there are differences in how majority and minority dialect-speaking children use the morphology as a cue to make inferences about a new word. Based on results from previous studies, minority dialect-speaking children should use their grammatical knowledge of the minority dialect to guide the inferences they make when processing majority dialect sentences. By studying minority dialect-speaking children, the researchers evaluate how children with diverse linguistic experiences process sentences and how linguistic variation shapes what cues children attend to when processing sentences in both a familiar and unfamiliar dialect.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.