This grant supports collaborative research on the language production system, especially how it develops in children. Five studies examine fluency and points of sentence planning difficulty by manipulating properties of certain sentence structures. The sentences emphasize relative clauses, exemplified by "who the boy was calling" in the sentence "The girl found the teacher who the boy was calling." Such structures challenge the sentence planning mechanism because the relative clause involves relationships among different elements (teacher and who relate to calling in the example here). This research compares nonfluencies like pauses and restarts across both structural variations and ages of speakers. The comparison across structures evaluates planning units, such as clauses, and what might stress sentence planning, such as distance between related elements. The comparison across speakers evaluates developmental changes in the system that handles such stresses. The experiments use two methods for studying language production. One is an imitation task, where people listen to a story and then imitate a sentence they hear about the story; the other is an elicitation task, where people produce their own sentence to designate a certain character in the story. The combination of methodology and structural emphasis here has the potential to produce outcomes that are transformative for both developmental and mature language production modeling.
Shedding light on the developing production system helps distinguish the effects of this dynamic system (the real-time act of producing language) from the effects of more static knowledge systems (the internal linguistic principles). This matters across domains of cognitive development, where research often relies on children's speech. Children's speech is also central in domains other than language and developmental sciences (e.g., in the court system and in the diagnosis and treatment of various impairments). Better understanding of the multiple and interacting influences on normally developing children's speech must eventually apply to such domains. The project also provides research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in Maine and Arizona, relying heavily on apprenticeship and independent study experiences. This grant includes annual support for student involvement in dissemination activities like professional conference presentations. Finally, support for the collaboration directly addresses the infrastructure for research and education in a particular partnership and strengthens the networks associated with this partnership, including students in all such activities.
