Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding how minority dialect-speaking children use inflectional verb morphology in sentence processing and word learning.

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation project investigates how dialect differences between minority and majority dialect-speaking children 5-10 years of age impact sentence processing and word learning. Dialects are rule-governed linguistic systems, yet linguistic features often differ across dialects. Dialects spoken by minority communities have been studied for its potential contribution to longstanding academic performance gaps between minority and majority students. One suggestion is that linguistic differences between a minority dialect and the dialect of instruction lead to a dialect mismatch that makes learning more difficult in the classroom. However, it remains unclear how speaking a minority dialect is related to academic performance because the work is primarily correlational. This study addresses that gap by investigating specific mechanisms using measures that are sensitive to sentence comprehension and language learning. Since the primary method of instruction in the classroom is through oral language, it is essential to understand how minority dialect-speaking children use the rules of their dialect to understand majority dialect sentences of the type more commonly found in schools. These results improve our understanding of how dialect mismatch impacts learning in real time while creating avenues for new strategies that can support spoken language comprehension and learning for children who speak different dialects and languages. The current research uses two experiments to investigate how minority and majority dialect-speaking children use subject-verb agreement, which differs between the dialects, to process majority dialect sentences and make inferences to learn new words. A previous study completed by the research team demonstrates that minority dialect-speaking children use their grammatical knowledge of their minority dialect to comprehend majority dialect sentences that were ambiguous due to linguistic differences. However, the absence of real-time measures of comprehension raises additional questions about what cues children rely on for sentence interpretation and how it relates to learning. Experiment 1 tests the hypothesis that dialect mismatch impacts how minority dialect-speaking children use dialect features marked differently than a majority dialect to process sentences. The experiment uses an eye-tracking task to evaluate how minority dialect-speaking children use subject-verb agreement (e.g., was/were) to infer the subject number in ambiguous majority dialect sentences. Experiment 2 tests the hypothesis that children’s language knowledge will shape how they use subject-verb agreement to make inferences about new words. The experiment uses a verb learning paradigm containing morphological features (e.g., was/were, is/are) that differ between the majority and minority dialect to examine if there are differences in how majority and minority dialect-speaking children use the morphology as a cue to make inferences about a new word. Based on results from previous studies, minority dialect-speaking children should use their grammatical knowledge of the minority dialect to guide the inferences they make when processing majority dialect sentences. By studying minority dialect-speaking children, the researchers evaluate how children with diverse linguistic experiences process sentences and how linguistic variation shapes what cues children attend to when processing sentences in both a familiar and unfamiliar dialect. 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.