Research Projects

minoritylanguageacquisition2.jpgMinority Language Acquisition

This research examines children’s acquisition of minority languages in New Mexico and examines children’s use of demonstratives in Spanish and in ASL. We ask how children’s and adults’ conceptualization of shared space is manifested in their use of demonstratives. We ask whether/how restricted input in the minority language (Spanish or ASL) affects children’s demonstratives. *Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and an ADVANCE UNM Women in Stem award. In collaboration with YDI Head Start New Mexico, we have investigated standardized progress monitoring tests commonly used to assess children's language skills to determine whether these tests are appropriate for our multilingual and multicultural community.This research led to the adoption of a   different assessment.*Funded by the McCune Charitable Foundation.

 

 

 

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Children's acquisition of morphosyntactic variation

Despite the widespread demonstration that the variable linguistic behavior of adults is highly systematic (e.g. Labov 1994), it is not yet well understood when and how children learn such variation and converge on probabilistic components of grammar. Recently, Naomi Shin (with K. Miller) has proposed a four-step developmental pathway of acquisition of morphosyntactic variation.. The pathway of development involves first producing only one of the variable forms (Step 1), producing both forms but in mutually-exclusive contexts (Step 2), then producing both forms in some overlapping linguistic contexts (Step 3), and finally producing both forms in more contexts (Step 4). The research reviewed indicates that input patterns are influential each step of the way, playing an important role in determining children’s use of forms as well as the contexts in which the forms are produced. In addition to considering input effects, the article also draws on various tendencies that children evince in the face of variable input to explain the pathway of development, including regularization and assigning different meanings to different forms. The proposal draws on some of Shin's own corpus studies of monolingual children’s acquisition of Spanish subject pronoun expression and subject-verb ~ verb-subject word order.

 

 

 

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Spanish-English bilingual children's direct object clitics and grammatical gender

Naomi Shin's research on Spanish direct object clitics focuses on bilingual children’s comprehension and production of clitic gender in Spanish (lo, la, los, las).*  Findings indicate that children with higher English vocabulary scores and higher levels of English use at home produce more gender mismatches, especially the use of lo to refer to inanimate feminine referents. In contrast, Spanish, but not English, vocabulary scores, correlate with direct object expression with transitive verbs. (*Funded by SI Foundation and UNM RAC). 

A corpus study by Shin & her former student Tom Goebel-Mahrle supports the conclusion that Spanish-English bilingual children may use lo for inanimate referents, regardless of gender. In addition, Shin's collaboration with Alejandro Cuza (Purdue) & Liliana Sánchez (UIC-Chicago) finds that Spanish-English bilingual children produce strong clitics as direct objects (e.g., cobijar ella) and higher rates of direct object lexical NPs as compared to monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Further, the less Spanish they experience, the more they rely on direct object lexical NPs rather than clitics.