Research Statement

Li-jen Kuo

The three overarching themes of my current research work are: 1) the cognitive processes involved in biliteracy development; 2) the emergence of a phonotactic schema; and 3) the development of argumentation skills among school-aged children.

Cognitive Processes involved in Biliteracy Development My first research project investigates how early exposure to a second language shapes childrens development of metalinguistic awareness. Drawing upon Hakuta and Diazs (1985) theory of bilingual cognitive effects, I have proposed a theory that predicts early exposure to a second language promotes greater cognitive flexibility, which accelerates childrens development of metalinguistic awareness and enables them to more rapidly reformulate rules that govern the composition of their linguistic inventory. I have also developed a novel research paradigm where bilingual and monolingual children are compared on an abstract, rather than a language-specific, level of metalinguistic awareness. This paradigm enables research to isolate factors that are usually intertwined and difficult to untangle, such as language relatedness and disparity in language proficiency of the tested languages, and ensures that the metalinguistic awareness of bilingual and monolingual children are compared on equal ground. We can thus identify precisely what effect bilingualism has on the development of metalinguistic awareness. In my dissertation, I have focused on the development of phonological awareness, which has been identified as one of the strongest predictors of early literacy development. Preliminary analyses have confirmed that bilingual children show greater sensitivity to both the segmental units and distributional patterns of phonological input. At Northern Illinois University, I anticipate a research agenda that further develops my theory of bilingual cognitive effects in three directions. First, I plan to replicate my current research on phonological awareness development among other bilingual/ second language learner populations to validate and refine my theory. Second, I hope to extend my investigation to other levels of metalinguistic awareness, including morphological awareness and syntactic awareness, both of which I have gained substantial background in during my graduate study at the University of Illinois (Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Kuo & Anderson, in press). Finally, it is
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my intent to use the results of these investigations to better inform the development and implementation of language curriculum for second language as well as foreign language learners.

Emergence of Phonotactic Schema Recent research from experimental psychology has shown that phonotactic regularities can be acquired through intensive recent production and auditory experience (e.g., Dell, Reed, Adams & Meyer, 2000; Onishi, Chambers & Fisher, 2002). My research project on phonotactic learning further explores this topic within an Optimality Theory (OT) framework (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), and investigates whether language learners prefer unmarked patterns over marked patterns. The experiments involve the learning of the contingency relationship between onsets and medial glides by native speakers of Mandarin. Three artificial phonological systems were created. In the Place version, onsets associated with the same medial glides share the same place feature. This phonotactic regularity is consistent with the way onsets and medial glides are associated in many world languages, and thus can be considered as an unmarked constraint. In the Manner version, the contingency relationship between onsets and glides varies with the manner feature of the onsets. In the Neither version, onsets associated with the same glides do not form a natural class. The results reveal that natural phonological constraints are more easily acquired than unnatural ones. However, no difference was found between the learning of the Place version and the learning of the Manner version. The lack of difference can be taken as evidence against a bias for unmarked constraints. However, it can also be attributed to a possible asymmetry between the perception learning mechanism and the production learning mechanism: While the experiments involved primarily auditory learning and perceptual judgments, the unmarked constraint in favor of the Place version is likely to be articulatorilybased. Currently, I am investigating such an asymmetry in unmarked constraints (auditorilybased vs. articulatorily based) by incorporating psycholinguistic experiments involving production tasks. In the future, I would like to extend this line of research to other constraints proposed in the OT framework. More broadly, my aim is to bridge the gap between phonological theory and experimental psychology.

Childrens Development of Argumentation Skills

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My third major research area is in childrens development of argumentation skills. While the ability to decode and to comprehend texts is fundamental, literacy development ultimately must reach a level where readers are engaged in the texts intellectually and critically. Undoubtedly, the ability to comprehend and present an argument is essential for an active and mindful participation in our society. Over the past decade, in a series of research projects here at the Center for the Study of Reading, we have developed a discussion format called Collaborative Reasoning (CR), which improves children argumentation skills and critical thinking abilities (Reznitskaya et al., 2001). In CR, children read a selection introducing a moral, social or environmental issue and then engage in small group discussions on a controversial topic that emerges from the reading. The open-discussion format exposes children to alternative perspectives and provides an opportunity to formulate and make public their own ideas. Currently, I am extending this line of research to investigate whether introverted and low-achieving children can benefit equally from CR. I also plan to develop integrated lesson plans that specifically target multicultural issues to involve second language learners actively in CR and to enrich the cultural awareness of monolingual children. More broadly, my aim is to modify the existing discussion format and to expand the scope of issues being discussed in CR to accommodate traditionally marginalized populations in small group discussions.

References Bialystok, E., Majumder, S., & Martin, M. M. (2003). Developing phonological awareness: Is there a bilingual advantage? Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 27-44. Center for Applied Linguistics. (2004). Directory of Two-Way Bilingual Immersion Program in the U.S. Retrieved September 10, 2004, from http://www.cal.org/twi/directory Dell, G. S., Reed, K. D., Adams, D. R., & Meyer, A.S. (2000). Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: A study of the role of experience in language production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 1355-1367, Hakuta, K & Diaz, R. M. (1985). The relationship between degree of bilingualism and cognitive ability: A critical discussion and some new longitudinal data. In K. E. Nelson

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(Ed.). Childrens Language (pp. 319-344). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kuo, L. - J. & Anderson, R. C. (in press). Conceptual and methodological issues in comparing metalinguistic awareness across languages. In K. Koda and A. Zehler (Eds.), Learning to read across languages. Hillsdale, N. J.: L. Erlbaum Associates. Kuo, L. - J. & Anderson, R. C. (2006). Morphological awareness and learning to read: A cross-language perspective. Educational Psychologist, 41, 161-180. Onishi, K. H., Chambers, K. E., & Fisher, C. (2002). Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience. Cognition, 83, B13-B23. Prince, A., & Smolensky, P., (1993). Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Unpublished manuscript. Reznitskaya, A., Anderson, R. C., McNurlen, B., Nguyen-Jahiel, K., Archodidou, A., Kim, S. Y. (2001). Influence of oral discussion on written argument. Discourse Processes, 32, 155-175.

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Research Statement
My research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie spoken language. I am interested in understanding how languages are learned, represented, and processed. Using a combination of experimental and computational methods, my research explores constraints on word formation. This includes morphology (the study of form and meaning), phonology (the study of sound patterns), and speech perception (how words are recognized in fluent speech). My goal is use the patterns that are found among languages of the world as a basis to form hypotheses about how the mind must work in order to produce such patterns.

PATTERN LEARNING IN LANGUAGE: MORPHEME SEGMENTATION During my postdoctoral research at the University of Rochester, Dr. Elissa Newport and I developed a paradigm to understand how language learners determine which words in their language are constructed from the same constituent parts, referred to as morphemes (e.g. cat + s). While previous research has focused on word meaning as the driving force in learning to segment morphemes, we hypothesize that learners make use of a variety of distributional properties, such as frequency and similarity. These distributional properties of words the parts that recur across a number of words in the language allow the learner to determine the stems and the affixes from which words are constructed. In our first set of experiments, we demonstrated that adults (Finley & Newport, 2010; in preparation) and school-aged children (Finley & Newport, in press) use distributional information to parse complex words into stems and affixes. Our second set of experiments explored learners ability to parse a highly irregular and infrequent pattern, infixation (infixation occurs when an affix is inserted inside a stem; bedo bemedo). We hypothesized that infixation patterns are more difficult to learn because this type of affixation breaks apart the continuity of the stem. Infixation patterns rarely occur unless there is some phonetic or phonological gain from infixing over prefixation or suffixation (such as ease of pronunciation). Without such cognitive gains built into our artificially created languages, learners were unable to parse forms into stems and infixes. Our third set of experiments explored how adult learners use distributional information to parse words that share different sets of regularities between consonants and vowels. This type of nonconcatenative morphology is found in languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, in which a set of

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consonants forms a root (e.g., ptk), and vowels form a pattern around these vowels (e.g., ptk, ae patek). Learners were exposed to a simulated version of this type of pattern in which the consonants (ptk, mbg) and the vowels (ae, ou) formed separable units (e.g., patek, potuk, mabeg, mobug). Our results demonstrate that English-speaking adult learners are biased to parse the words in terms of syllables (e.g., patek as pa + tek), and did not show evidence of parsing words into consonant patterns. This bias was overcome when the distributional information highlighted the consistencies of the consonants and the vowels. First, when words had prefixed forms in addition to the non-concatenative forms (e.g. patek, mu-patek), learners were able to parse consonants as separable units. Second, learners were able to parse the consonants when the variability of the vowels exceeded the variability of the consonants (e.g., 12 consonant patterns, and 24 vowel patterns). Third, learners were able to parse consonants and vowels when additional consonant-vowel structures were added in addition to the CVCVC shape used in previous studies (e.g., CCVC, CVCCV, etc.). These results suggest that learners are highly sensitive to the distributional properties of morphological systems, even when the morphological patterns are quite different from those of their native language, as long as the distributional information they receive adequate to reveal the underlying pattern. This work is part of a research program that addresses the question of what a language must look like in order to be learnable, and how cognitive learning biases shape the way in which the worlds languages are structured. In addition, our computational work (with Dr. Neal Snider) focuses on the mechanisms that learners use to discover when similar-sounding words are morphologically related (e.g., cat and cats), as opposed to words that sound similar but share no meaning relationship (e.g., cat and cap). Future work will explore the nature of distributional information in learning complex morphological systems, and how phonological representations influence the structure of linguistic systems.

PATTERN LEARNING IN LANGUAGE: PHONOLOGY In my research, I train nave adult participants on phonological patterns to address several questions pertaining to the psychology of language. My work has addressed questions about the whether language is learned through a language-specific mechanism, or through domain-general

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cognitive constraints (Finley and Badecker, 2010; Finley and Christiansen, 2011), as well as questions regarding whether linguistic experience alters the representations for consonants and vowels (Finley, 2011-a; Finley, submitted). In addition, the paradigm has been used to understand the psychological nature of linguistic constructs such as features (Finley and Badecker, 2009), hierarchical representations (Finley, in press; Finley, submitted-a) and phonetic grounding (Finley, 2011-b; Finley, in preparation; Finley, submitted-b; Finley and Badecker, submitted). For example, I used a vowel harmony learning task to test the existence of abstract representations in speech (Finley and Badecker, 2009). Harmony is a phonological pattern that requires all vowels (in vowel harmony) or consonants (in consonant harmony) share a particular phonetic feature value within a single word. In a series of experiments, learners were exposed to vowel harmony patterns involving suffixed alternations (e.g., [pugo, pugomu; dipe, dipemi]). This exposure included four vowels from a six-vowel inventory. At test, participants were asked to make harmony judgments using all six vowels (thereby testing whether learners can generalize the harmony feature to novel vowels). Our results indicated a strong tendency to generalize harmony to novel stem vowels, demonstrating that learners do represent words in terms of their phonological features, rather than simply holistically learning the vowels that participate in the pattern. I have also explored the nature of hierarchical representations in learning phonological systems (Finley, submitted-a). In order to understand how the mind represents complex, hierarchically structured linguistic patterns, I compared how adults learn two phonological patterns that on the surface are very similar, but require very different linguistic representations. One type of pattern (deemed opaque vowels) requires only adjacent, flat-structured representations (e.g., aXb, where X and b are required to share a feature. A similar type of pattern (deemed transparent vowels) is represented with non-adjacent dependencies (e.g., aXb where a and b are required to share a feature). Adult learners were exposed to a vowel harmony pattern that required either adjacent representation (opaque vowels) or non-adjacent representations (transparent vowels) that required nonadjacent vowels to conform to the harmony pattern. Participants in both conditions were able to learn the basic harmony pattern, but participants in the non-adjacent (transparent) condition failed to learn the nonadjacent aspect of the pattern. A series of follow-up experiments demonstrated that increasing the training in terms of types (number of words containing the relevant non-adjacent sequences) as well as tokens (number of times each type was heard) is sufficient for participants to learn the non-adjacent
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pattern. These results suggest that the information required for learning a language is dependent on the complexity of the representation, even when the surface structure of the words may appear similar. Another example of how seemingly trivial surface differences can result in large differences in representations comes from consonant harmony. Languages with consonant harmony allow an unbounded number of intervening segments between the source and the target for harmony (e.g., agreement of /s/ vs. /sh/ in the word form /VsVCVCVCsV/). My research (Finley, 2011, in press) has demonstrated that it is possible to learn consonant harmony patterns across large distances (shown for up to four intervening syllables), but adult learners are nonetheless biased towards adjacent patterns. Learners generalize from non-adjacent patterns to adjacent patterns, but not vice versa. These results demonstrate that learners form representations for novel patterns based on their biases towards adjacent elements.

FUTURE WORK I am fully committed to an interdisciplinary research program that incorporates multiple methodologies in order to better understand spoken language and the relationship between the structure of language and the structure of the mind. I will continue to develop experimental paradigms that address the nature of morphological and phonological representations. My research will continue along three distinct lines. First, I plan to continue my research on the nature of linguistic representations in adults and children. I will make use of a variety of experimental approaches, including artificial grammar learning, speech perception, perceptual adaptation, and word recognition. I plan to continue to compare children and adults (from infants to teenagers) in order to understand the developmental trajectory of language learning mechanisms. By understanding the similarities and differences in what children and adults are able to learn, we can better understand why children appear to be better language learners than adults. Second, I will continue to explore computational methods as tools for connecting experimental and theoretical results. This type of work involves developing formal, axiomatic

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approaches to hypothesis testing, allowing for clear, concise links between data and theory. The use of computational tools to model and predict experimental data can provide further insights into the representations and mechanisms that underlie the learning process. In addition to building computational models of experiments that I have already completed, I plan to use computational models as tools for designing future experiments. Third, I am interested in expanding my research program to directly test questions of second language learning and bilingualism using artificial grammar learning paradigms. I am especially interested in exploring the effect of simultaneous bilingualism on learning biases and pattern learning in adulthood. I plan to compare monolinguals and bilinguals on several learning tasks, both linguistic and non-linguistic, in order to understand how language experience shapes the learning mechanism. Through these lines of research, I have built a research program in which clear formal hypotheses about the representations of morphological and phonological processes can be tested using experimental, computational and theoretical methods. I believe that my research will lead to a better understanding of language and language development. To this end, I would be very interested in collaborating with various researchers on issues of language development, language and thought, and the neural underpinnings of language.

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