Calvin Prof Gains NSF Grant

February 29, 2008 == MEDIA ADVISORY

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

A Calvin College professor of Spanish has earned 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. "What I am interested in is how different types of variation in the language children hear affects the type of language they initially acquire."

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

Though the research has a seemingly specific focus, it may shed light on the wider picture of how languages change. Miller said the project also has practical implications for language testing and standardized tests in education.

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.

Contact Miller at 616-526-8540

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Received on Thu Feb 28 22:15:38 2008