Calvin Spanish Professor Wins Research Grant

A Calvin College professor of Spanish has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study language acquisition in Chile and Mexico City.

"The ability to acquire language is innate and specific to humans, and we know that the language children acquire is based on the language that they hear around them," said Karen Miller, a Calvin professor of Spanish, who will use the three-year $166,217 NSF grant to study how children native to those two places learn and incorporate plural morphology in Spanish. Morphology is the internal structure of words.

"What I am interested in is how different types of variation in the language children hear affects the type of language they initially acquire," said Miller.

With the help of Calvin student researchers, Miller will collect nine hours of conversation between 64 parent-child pairs in both Chile and Mexico City. One group of researchers will transcribe the conversations, another will provide phonetic transcription and a third will make a morphological transcription and develop statistics on the data.

Eventually the research will be published in journals related to linguistics and cognitive science and presented at several conferences. It will also be posted on the CHILDES database, a digital collection of transcript and media data collected from conversations between young children and their playmates and caretakers. "That way, other researchers from anywhere in the world can use our data," Miller said.

Full story see http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2007-08/miller-language-acquisition.htm