Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Role of Verb Bias on the Processing of Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences in Spanish-English Bilinguals

博士论文研究：动词偏差对西英双语者句法歧义句处理的作用

• 批准号: 0718454
• 负责人: Paola Dussias
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-07-01 至 2010-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0718454&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Role; Verb

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Tracy Cramer Scaltz will collect data for her doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dr. Paola (Giuli) Dussias. This research will examine how first and second language verbal information influences the way in which grammatical structure is built during sentence comprehension. Recent psycholinguistic research suggests that information associated with verbs varies between Spanish and English. This provides an optimal testbed to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals use verbal information specific to the language being processed at a particular point in time or whether there is cross-linguistic permeability between the two languages, such that information in one language affects processing in the other language. The idea of cross-linguistic permeability is relevant because there is compelling evidence that bilingual language comprehension involves the simultaneous activation of information related to both the first and second languages. At the word level, a cognate (words with the same meaning and similar orthographic-phonological form in a bilingual's two languages) facilitation effect has been found across lexical decision and word naming tasks with bilingual populations. At the sentential level, cross-language activation also persists when cognates are embedded in sentence contexts. Taken together, these findings suggest that the influence of first language verbal information during second language sentence processing may be more readily evident for cognates than for non-cognates. Ms. Cramer Scaltz's experiments will examine the performance of highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals in two eye-tracking studies to determine the extent to which verbal information of cognates and non-cognates influences the ease or difficulty encountered during sentence comprehension. She will also investigate whether the increased lexical activation that cognates provide guides bilinguals to use first language verbal information during second language sentence processing. Bilingual participants will take a battery of proficiency tests and will complete a verb norming questionnaire in their second language to determine their knowledge of English verbal information. The bilinguals' performance on these tasks will be compared to monolingual controls. This research will provide new insights into how speakers exploit first and second verbal information and will pave the way for more detailed inquiry into how bilingual communities in the US and abroad can profit from recognizing knowledge about the similarities and differences between English and Spanish. The results will enrich the basic understanding of learning a second language, while providing useful information for teaching second language structural patterns to adult language learners. In addition, the project will increase the diversity of the pool of trained language researchers, while establishing opportunities for international collaboration between Hispanic scholars abroad and scholars in the US.

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Tracy Cramer Scaltz女士将在Paola（Giuli）Dussias博士的指导下收集其博士学位论文的数据。这项研究将研究第一语言和第二语言的口头信息如何影响句子理解过程中语法结构的构建方式。最近的心理语言研究表明，与动词相关的信息在西班牙语和英语之间有所不同。这提供了一个最佳的测试床，以调查西班牙语 - 英语双语者是否使用特定于在特定时间点处理的语言的口头信息，或者两种语言之间是否存在跨语言渗透性，这样一种语言中的信息会影响另一种语言的处理。跨语言渗透性的想法是相关的，因为有令人信服的证据表明，双语语言理解涉及同时激活与第一语言和第二种语言有关的信息。在单词层面上，在词汇决策和具有双语种群的单词命名任务中发现了一个同源（具有相同含义和相似的矫正语音形式的单词）。在句子级别上，当将人物嵌入句子上下文中时，跨语言激活也持续存在。综上所述，这些发现表明，在第二语言句子处理过程中，第一语言语言信息的影响可能比非认知更容易看出。 Cramer Scaltz女士的实验将在两项眼神训练的研究中研究高度熟练的西班牙语双语者的表现，以确定认知和非认知的言语信息影响句子理解过程中遇到的轻松或困难。她还将调查认识增加的词汇激活是否提供了指南，双语者在第二语言句子处理过程中使用第一语言语言信息。双语参与者将参加一系列的熟练程度测试，并以第二语言完成动词规范问卷，以确定他们对英语口头信息的了解。双语者在这些任务上的表现将与单语对控件进行比较。这项研究将提供有关说话者如何利用第一和第二口头信息的新见解，并为对美国和国外的双语社区的更详细询问铺平道路，从认识到英语和西班牙语之间的相似性和差异的知识中获利。结果将丰富学习第二语言的基本理解，同时为成人语言学习者提供有用的信息来教授第二语言结构模式。此外，该项目将增加训练有素的语言研究人员的多样性，同时为美国的西班牙裔学者与美国的学者之间建立国际合作的机会。