Acquiring one's native language is a tremendous achievement. Most 3 year olds already exhibit both a solid understanding of the linguistic exchanges that surround them, and also, within the limits set by their expanding vocabulary, a significant ability to express themselves in that language. Four main questions arise: How do they get to this point? Where do they start? Do they exhibit the same patterns in production (the forms they use) and comprehension (the forms they understand)? How much is tied to the particular grammatical properties of the language they are acquiring? Few non-contradictory answers exist, in large part because of the notorious difficulty of testing linguistic comprehension in very young children.
With funding from the Linguistics Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering, Dr. Geraldine Legendre and Dr. Isabelle Barriere will seek answers to these and other related questions using recently developed non-invasive experimental methods. Based on measuring the duration of gazing at short videos paired with short audio descriptions that match or do not match the videos, these methods have been used to test linguistic comprehension in very young children acquiring English. The research team will apply such methods to the testing of children acquiring French, a language which has a richer system of marking tense, person, and gender distinctions than English. This novel study of comprehension in young children from a cross-linguistic perspective will inform the debate on, and attempt to resolve contradictory claims pertaining to, first language acquisition. Broader impacts include advancing the diagnostic of atypical linguistic development by establishing a benchmark for both typical production and comprehension, creating research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University, and fostering scientific dialogue with research communities abroad.
