This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and supported by SBE's Science of Learning program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Lisa Pearl at the University of California, Irvine, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating children's understanding of pronouns. Pronouns are highly dependent on both grammatical information and contextual information, making them an ideal test case in which to study children's developing ability to integrate multiple pieces of information. Linguists have fairly well-developed theories about how pronominal morphology, pronominal form, and discourse connectives contribute individually to deciding what a pronoun refers to, but far less is understood about how these pieces of information are combined in the mind of the listener, and even less is known about how the child listener decides which pieces of information to prioritize. The question is further complicated by the fact that some of these cues are probabilistic, meaning that they favor but do not require certain pronoun interpretations, and by the fact that their abundance in the input varies across different dialects of the same language. Understanding how children's cue integration mechanism works and how it reacts to statistical variation can inform theories of language change and cognitive development. It can also be useful for diagnosing atypical development and inform efforts at improving school readiness through interventions in the quantity and quality of children's input.
This project encompasses a series of coordinated experimental, corpus, and computational modeling studies. Phase 1 uses experimental and corpus methods to pinpoint the age at which children first become sensitive to three specific cues. (i) Verbal agreement morphology, (ii) intra-clausal semantic relations or discourse relations, and (iii) pronominal form (null vs. overt pronouns), have all been found to influence pronoun interpretation in Spanish. Phase 2 addresses the question of cue integration by tracking how children rank these cues relative to one another across ages 3, 4, and 5, using experimental methods. Phase 3 addresses the question of how children can potentially extract these rankings from their input, and whether inter-dialectal differences in the input lead to different ranking outcomes. Corpus work will first determine the distribution of each cue in the input that children receive. Next, a computational model will be used to estimate the weight assigned to each of these cues, based on their distribution in the input and children's observed ranking behavior from Phase 2. This model will provide a precise, quantifiable proposal for how children weight each cue and how these weights change over the course of development. The novelty of this approach lies in bringing together established insights from different theoretical domains (morphosyntax, discourse pragmatics, sociolinguistics) to show how they can not only coexist but also interact in the mind of the learner.
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.
