FOS: Fwd: Reminder - Cristina Schmitt colloquium tomorrow (9/15)

[Suzanne Evans Wagner]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Cara Feldscher <feldsch3 at msu.edu>
Date: Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 12:21 AM
Subject: Reminder - Cristina Schmitt colloquium tomorrow (9/15)
To: <lin-grad at lin.msu.edu>


Hi everyone,

Just a reminder that tomorrow (9/15) will be our first colloquium talk of
the semester. Our speaker will be Professor Cristina Schmitt from our own
linguistics department, and her talk is titled "*Language acquisition in a
dialect contact situation*" (abstract below).

As per usual, the talk is at 4:30pm in Wells B342. We hope to see you
there! Unfortunately no dinner after this time, but come to dinner after
next time!

Sincerely,
Cara and Alicia
MSU Linguistics Colloquium Co-Chairs
feldsch3 at msu.edu, parris39 at msu.edu

----------------------
*Language acquisition in a dialect contact situation*
Cristina Schmitt (Michigan State University)

Children quickly and efficiently become competent speakers of a language,
but how do they do this? Researchers all agree that the acquisition process
must involve an interplay between innate biases and properties of the input
(the language children are exposed to). Of course beyond that, there is
much disagreement about the division of labor between innate biases and
external forces. However, a good understanding of how children cope with
different types of input can help shed some light on the nature of the
innate biases and how they guide children’s acquisition path. In this
project we examine children’s acquisition under conditions of highly
variable input.

Most work on the acquisition of grammatical properties assumes that
children live in a homogeneous speech community with negligible amounts of
variation within and across speakers. Much like studying the physics of
motion by assuming a frictionless surface, idealizing the language
acquisition problem to a homogenous, non-varying environment was
methodologically important and allowed us to learn how core properties of
various languages are acquired (Chomsky 1965). In a typical study, almost
as in a fairy tale, the child reaches a well-understood, well-described and
clear-cut target state, which is taken to coincide almost exactly with the
grammar of the caretakers and the speech community.

But the ideal homogeneous speech community in reality does not exist. Every
community with internal social divisions will have a certain amount of
sociolinguistic variation, and historically speaking, contact between
different languages has always been “the norm not the exception” (Thomason
2001:12).

In my previous work with Karen Miller we have shown that sociolinguistic
variation has an effect on the speed at which children converge to the
adult grammar. However, it does not prevent the acquisition of the target
grammar. In fact, Miller (2007) showed that by age 7, even children whose
input had high rates of ambiguity could use number morphology in
comprehension tasks just as reliably as adults.

In this project we go a step further and we examine the acquisition of
grammatical properties in a much less stable situation, that of language
and dialect contact. Specifically we examine the acquisition of agreement
and VP complement realization in a situation of contact between two
mutually intelligible dialects of Spanish: Rioplatense Spanish and
Paraguayan Spanish.

In contrast to the socially stratified variation associated, for example,
to a phonetic rule within a stable community, variation induced by language
and dialect contact exposes the child to data generated by multiple
grammars, providing less than straightforward evidence for any particular
hypothesis. Such a situation creates a tension between two forces: the
force that drives generalization (Yang 2015, 2016), and the force that
requires children to be as faithful to the input as they can.

Our goal is to examine the acquisition of Spanish by children exposed to
two different varieties of Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires, Argentina: the
local, dominant variety, known as Rioplatense Spanish, and the socially
marked Paraguayan variety. Language contact involving closely related
varieties poses a particularly interesting problem for language
acquisition, since the child is exposed to input data which may not be
consistent with a single grammar, despite the fact that the overall
similarity between the two varieties in terms of a shared lexicon and
broadly similar syntax might appear to support a single grammar analysis.

The paper is divided in three parts: (i) to discuss some methodological
issues associated to data collection in contact situations; (ii) to outline
the learning problem for the child in contact situations and (iii) to
present some preliminary results from natural speech data related to
agreement and DP complement realization.
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