Collaborative Research: Effects of Unreliable Input on Children' s Acquisition of Spanish

合作研究：不可靠的输入对儿童习得西班牙语的影响

• 批准号: 0746089
• 负责人: Karen Miller
• 金额: $ 10.09万
• 依托单位: Calvin University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-04-01 至 2010-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0746089&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Effects; Unreliable; Input

Children acquire a linguistic system in a short amount of time and with no great apparent effort. This is a hard task made much harder by the fact that children are exposed to a high degree of variation. For example, no two words are ever pronounced exactly the same way. There is variation across dialects, as well as intra- and inter-speaker variability that can be linked to socio-economic status, gender, etc. Most research on language acquisition has either assumed that the language the child is exposed to is not variable or has modeled input variability either computationally or in a small-scale laboratory setting. This project will examine the effects of input variability on the acquisition of plural morphology in two dialects of Spanish. Chilean Spanish has a socio-linguistically conditioned phonological process which masks the realization of plural morphology, but Mexico City Spanish does not. By studying how children acquire plural markers in a natural setting, researchers will be able to determine how (un)reliable input affects the acquisition process and also what sorts of input data are relevant to the child who is building her own internalized grammatical system.The comparison of the acquisition process in these two varieties of Spanish can be used as a testing ground for various hypotheses about the ways in which the learning mechanism interacts with the input data. These studies will provide much needed data which will contribute to a better understanding of the influence of dialect variation on children's early language development. Dialect variation must be taken into consideration when evaluating children's performance in the context of standardized testing, teaching strategies and clinical intervention in the case of speech disorders. Approximately 300 hours of transcribed speech will be made available to other researchers via a computer searchable database concerning the development of plural morphology in children who are exposed to dialects where the plural suffix is omitted to various degrees. These data can then be used by speech pathologists to design dialect-sensitive tests.

儿童在短时间内获得语言系统，并且没有明显的努力。这是一项艰巨的任务，因为孩子受到高度差异的事实。例如，没有两个单词以完全相同的方式发音。方言之间存在差异，以及可以与社会经济状况，性别等相关的言论和言论扬声器的变化。大多数对语言获取的研究都假设孩子所接触的语言不是可变的，或者在计算上或在小规模的实验室环境中对输入变异性进行了建模。该项目将研究输入变异性对两个西班牙语方言中复数形态的获取的影响。智利西班牙语具有社会语言条件的语音过程，可以掩盖复数形态的实现，但墨西哥城西班牙没有。通过研究儿童如何在自然环境中获取复数标记，研究人员将能够确定（联合国）可靠的输入如何影响获取过程，以及哪些输入数据与建立自己的内部语法系统的孩子相关。在这两种西班牙语中，在这两种品种中，可以将其作为测试地面来进行各种方法，以相互作用。这些研究将提供急需的数据，这将有助于更好地理解方言变化对儿童早期语言发展的影响。在言语障碍的情况下，在标准化测试，教学策略和临床干预的背景下评估儿童的表现时，必须考虑方言变化。大约300个小时的抄录语音将通过可搜索的计算机数据库提供给其他研究人员，这些数据库涉及在暴露于各种程度上省略多元后缀的儿童中复数形态的发展。然后，语音病理学家可以将这些数据用于设计方言敏感测试。