Doctoral Dissertation Research: Finding Interrogativity

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Language is used to perform various kinds of communicative acts - providing information, asking questions, making requests, etc. In any language, there are specific signals in the form of a sentence that indicates what communicative act it is typically used for. But these signals vary from language to language. This project examines how children learn to identify the communicative acts of the people speaking to them while learning the surface signals associated with these acts. Specifically, this project investigates how children come to associate interrogatives ("Do you want a cookie?") to questions. Mapping interrogatives to questions present interesting acquisition challenges. First, children need to figure out the form of interrogative clauses in their language: while all languages tend to have dedicated clauses for questions, the syntactic makeup of these interrogatives differ: in English, interrogatives usually differ from declaratives in word order (e.g. "Do you want a cookie" vs. "I want a cookie"), but not in Mandarin. To figure out the form of their language’s interrogatives, children need to notice regularities in form. But how do children figure out which regularities matter, and how do they associate clause types with their canonical function? Second, children need to figure out when speakers are asking questions (vs. making assertions or requests). But how can they do so, if they can’t yet rely on the forms typically used for these acts? Previous research shows that, despite the complexity of the task, children understand interrogatives and their conventionalized function as questions before age three. To investigate how children solve this complex mapping problem, this project examines how questions are asked in speech to children, using what forms, comparing English and Mandarin: how much formal regularity is there in how parents ask questions? And are there extralinguistic cues in speakers’ behavior that can give away questionhood (e.g., pauses in conversation or focus of attention)? The project tests the hypothesis that children learn to identify speech act (question) and clause type (interrogative) in tandem and mutually informative ways: children learn to identify interrogatives by tracking formal regularities in conjunction with their growing knowledge of questionhood and its associated social cues; similarly, they identify questions by tracking social cues in conjunction with their growing understanding of interrogative syntax. The project will consist of two corpus studies and one computational model: Study 1 examines conversations between English-speaking parent-child dyads and Study 2 conversations between Mandarin parent-child dyads, where parent utterances will be annotated for pragmatic, prosodic, and syntactic features. The annotated data will then be used to test the viability of this pragmatic syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis via computational modeling (Study 3). 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.