Doctoral Dissertation Research: Literacy Effects on Language Acquisition and Sentence Processing in Adult L1 and School-Age Heritage Speakers of Spanish

博士论文研究：识字对西班牙语成人母语和学龄传统使用者语言习得和句子处理的影响

• 批准号: 1823881
• 负责人: Silvina Montrul
• 金额: $ 1.9万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-08-15 至 2023-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1823881&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Literacy; Effects

Of the many English Language Learners (ELLs) in American schools today, roughly 75% speak Spanish as their native language. This represents nearly four million children who speak Spanish at home while attending school in English. The linguistic variation that these children are exposed to is one possible factor that may contribute to the persistent achievement gap between school-age ELLs and their monolingual, English-speaking peers. Research that investigates how bilingual language development progresses during the school-age period is critically needed to understand the factors that affect language development at this age and to develop programs that facilitate linguistic growth and academic success in all learners. Contrary to historical 'English-only' approaches, recent evidence suggests that providing ELLs with academic training in their first and second language leads to better outcomes in both languages. However, it is less clear what specific aspects of development contribute to this observation and what their long-term effects into adulthood may be. This study investigates the impact of literacy in ELLs' first language as one important component of school-age development that may enhance the ability to comprehend oral language. The findings of this study will have important consequences for young ELLs, who commonly acquire reading and writing skills in their second language.This project takes a psycholinguistic perspective to investigate the role of literacy in the language development of school-age ELLs. It tests the Literacy Enhancement Hypothesis, which claims learning to read and write improves language comprehension by strengthening an individual's ability to more efficiently monitor morphological structures. The linguistic focus is gender and number markers on nouns and participles in Spanish because these are often important cues for tracking referents in complex sentences, such as passives, which are more frequent in written than in spoken language. In some cases, successfully interpreting (im)plausible passive sentences in Spanish requires listeners to attend to morphosyntactic agreement dependencies between the verb and its object. Study 1 tests 9-10 year old Spanish-speaking children (half in dual language, half in English only schools) and Study 2 tests low to high literate Spanish-speaking adults. Both studies include two identical experiments. One experiment uses visual world eye tracking techniques to measure how learning to read and write in Spanish affects these speakers' ability to use gender markers on past participles in passives sentences to anticipate the object of a sentence. The other experiment uses event related potentials (ERPs) to measure if differences in brain responses to critical words in similar sentences indicate how literacy impacts the use of syntactic and semantic information during auditory sentence processing. The findings will help improve understanding of the interaction between literacy and linguistic knowledge, and how this interaction impacts cognitive processes involved in oral language comprehension in child and adult bilinguals with different academic language exposure and experience in their native language.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.

如今，在美国学校的众多英语学习者 (ELL) 中，大约 75% 的人以西班牙语为母语。这意味着近 400 万儿童在家里讲西班牙语，而在英语学校上学。这些孩子所接触到的语言差异是导致学龄 ELL 与只讲英语的同龄人之间持续存在成绩差距的一个可能因素。迫切需要研究学龄期间双语语言发展的进展情况，以了解影响该年龄段语言发展的因素，并制定促进所有学习者语言发展和学业成功的计划。与历史上的“纯英语”方法相反，最近的证据表明，为 ELL 提供第一语言和第二语言的学术培训可以使两种语言取得更好的结果。然而，目前尚不清楚发育的哪些具体方面有助于这一观察，以及它们对成年期的长期影响可能是什么。本研究调查了英语学习者第一语言读写能力的影响，作为学龄发展的一个重要组成部分，可能会增强理解口头语言的能力。这项研究的结果将对年轻的 ELL 产生重要影响，他们通常会获得第二语言的阅读和写作技能。该项目从心理语言学的角度来调查读写能力在学龄 ELL 语言发展中的作用。它测试了读写能力增强假说，该假说声称学习阅读和写作可以通过增强个人更有效地监控形态结构的能力来提高语言理解能力。语言重点是西班牙语中名词和分词上的性别和数字标记，因为这些通常是跟踪复杂句子中所指对象的重要线索，例如被动语态，这种句子在书面语言中比口语中更常见。在某些情况下，要成功地解释西班牙语中看似不合理的被动句，需要听众注意动词与其宾语之间的形态句法一致性依赖性。研究 1 测试 9-10 岁西班牙语儿童（一半在双语学校，一半在纯英语学校），研究 2 测试文化程度从低到高的西班牙语成人。这两项研究都包括两个相同的实验。一项实验使用视觉世界眼动追踪技术来测量学习西班牙语读写如何影响这些说话者在被动句中的过去分词上使用性别标记来预测句子宾语的能力。另一项实验使用事件相关电位（ERP）来测量大脑对相似句子中关键词的反应差异是否表明读写能力如何影响听觉句子处理过程中句法和语义信息的使用。这些发现将有助于提高对读写能力和语言知识之间相互作用的理解，以及这种相互作用如何影响具有不同学术语言接触和母语经验的儿童和成人双语者口语理解中的认知过程。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命通过使用基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，并被认为值得支持。