This project investigates language comprehension: how humans make predictions as they hear a sentence about how the sentence will continue. Language comprehension promises to shed light on how the mind integrates general knowledge with past experiences to deal with new situations. However, past studies of language comprehension have been limited to 'major' world languages (English, other European languages, Chinese, Japanese) and college-age students. This severely underrepresents the diversity of the world's languages and populations, and could potentially lead to scientific conclusions that are distorted or incomplete. This project broadens the range of research on language comprehension through the study of Chamorro, an Austronesian language of Micronesia.
Chamorro is spoken by 45,000 people in the Mariana Islands, which are part of the U.S. and its possessions. It is currently in the early stages of language endangerment. Dr. Matthew Wagers (a psycholinguist), Dr. Sandra Chung (a linguist), and Manuel Borja (a Chamorro native-speaker and educator) will undertake experimental studies that build on special linguistic features of Chamorro to uncover how Chamorro speakers comprehend their language in real time. In Chamorro, the verb comes first in the sentence; verb agreement differentiates questions from non-questions; and sentence structure is affected by animacy. Although these features also occur in other languages, they are rarely studied in psycholinguistics.
The studies will involve participants of many ages and educational levels in three of the Mariana Islands. Several young Chamorros will be trained in the goals and methods of the research and will help administer the studies. This project will broaden the empirical base of research on language comprehension. The experimental protocols developed can be extended to research on other languages not spoken in highly industrialized societies. The investigation will expose community members to scientific research, and in so doing, will affirm the unique contributions that a language can make to the scientific understanding of human cognition.
