Doctoral Dissertation Research: Similarity based interference and the acquisition of adjunct control

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Every community around the world has a language. In each community, within a few years and with high accuracy, children learn the language of their environment. Achieving high proficiency in at least one language is critical for learning the culture of the community, connecting with peers, and accessing an education. When language is delayed, other aspects of development may also be at risk. Studying how language develops in children is therefore of great importance, both for understanding how language interacts with other systems, and for identifying and diagnosing language delays. Although children learn language quickly, they continue to make some errors well after they achieve high proficiency in their first language. These errors, because they are so rare, provide useful insights into the mechanisms of language development. Many of the general cognitive processes proposed to interact with language in adults are known to develop much later than language, raising the question: to what extent are children's linguistic errors due to extra-linguistic processes, rather than incomplete linguistic knowledge? This research uses children's understanding of adjunct control, as in "John bumped Mary after tripping on the sidewalk," as a case study to investigate this question. For this sentence, adults only access a meaning in which John tripped, while children have been reported to exhibit a much wider range of interpretations, in which John, Mary or anyone tripped. All accounts to date of adjunct control in children have cited incomplete knowledge as the source of children's interpretations; this research pursues an alternative account--that children's knowledge is complete, but the extra-linguistic processing mechanisms are more error-prone in children than in adults, masking children's knowledge in contexts with a high processing load. Based on the manipulations used with similar types of sentences in adult sentence processing, this research investigates the effects of processing load on children's interpretations of sentences with adjunct control. At stake is a more continuous account that relates children's errors for adjunct control to parallel effects in adults, and presents the opportunity for future research to investigate other sentence types, the development of processing mechanisms, and how immature processing mechanisms affect language development. This research also includes an outreach component to local families and high schools, and will provide research experience to an undergraduate research assistant.