College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item The acquisition of adjunct control: grammar and processing(2016) Gerard, Juliana; Lidz, Jeffrey; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation uses children’s acquisition of adjunct control as a case study to investigate grammatical and performance accounts of language acquisition. In previous research, children have consistently exhibited non-adultlike behavior for sentences with adjunct control. To explain children’s behavior, several different grammatical accounts have been proposed, but evidence for these accounts has been inconclusive. In this dissertation, I take two approaches to account for children’s errors. First, I spell out the predictions of previous grammatical accounts, and test these predictions after accounting for some methodological concerns that might have influenced children’s behavior in previous studies. While I reproduce the non-adultlike behavior observed in previous studies, the predictions of previous grammatical accounts are not borne out, suggesting that extragrammatical factors are needed to explain children’s behavior. Next, I consider the role of two different types of extragrammatical factors in predicting children’s non-adultlike behavior. With a new task designed to address the task demands in previous studies, children exhibit significantly higher accuracy than with previous tasks. This suggests that children’s behavior has been influenced by task- specific processing factors. In addition to the task, I also test the predictions of a similarity-based interference account, which links children’s errors to the same memory mechanisms involved in sentence processing difficulties observed in adults. These predictions are borne out, supporting a more continuous developmental trajectory as children’s processing mechanisms become more resistant to interference. Finally, I consider how children’s errors might influence their acquisition of adjunct control, given the distribution in the linguistic input. I discuss the results of a corpus analysis, including the possibility that adjunct control could be learned from the input. The kinds of information that could be useful to a learner become much more limited, however, after considering the processing limitations that would interfere with the representations available to the learner.Item The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints/Mormon Children's Music: Its History, Transmission, and Place in Children's Cognitive Development(2005-08-01) Karnas-Haines, Colleen J.; Provine, Robert C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a children's auxiliary program for ages three to eleven that meets weekly before or after their Sunday worship service. This auxiliary, called Primary, devotes much of its time to singing. Music is not a childish diversion, but an essential activity in the children's religious education. This study examines the history of the songbooks published for Primary use, revealing the many religious and cultural factors that influence the compilations. The study then looks at the modern methods of transmission as the author observes the music education aspects of Primary. Lastly, the study investigates the children's use of and beliefs about Primary music through the lens of cognitive development. The study reveals that Primary music is an ever-evolving reflection of the theology, cultural trends, and practical needs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Unaware of such implications, the children use Primary music to express their religious musicality at cognitive developmentally appropriate levels.