Doctoral Dissertation Research: Infant Event Representations and Verb Argument Structure

在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，舍夫女士和她的导师佩尔费蒂博士将进行为期一年的调查，研究语言前的婴儿在观察到的事件中识别出与语言中动词论证结构相同的结构的可能性。动词参数结构是语言中描述事件的高度受限的格式。婴儿将世界上的事件映射到诸如“给予”和“拥抱”等概念上的能力提出了关于语言结构和事件感知的问题。作为成年人，我们从物体之间复杂甚至模糊的相互作用的场景中隐含地识别离散事件。此外，我们以非常一致的方式口头描述这些事件，将我们对事件的认知表征与我们对事件的语言表征联系起来。这个过程的困难在于，虽然可想象事件的世界可能是相当不受约束的，但语言本身是一种高度受约束的表示事件的格式。那么，习得语言的婴儿是如何学会将不那么受限制的世界映射到高度受限制的语言结构上的呢？Scherff和Perfetti将研究学龄前婴儿（10-12个月）和刚开始产生单词组合的婴儿（18-20个月）的事件感知和动词论点结构的习得。他们的项目关注的是婴儿是否根据强制性参与者的数量对事件进行概念性分类，这一操作可能对获得具有不同论点结构的动词至关重要。Scherff和Perfetti将使用对儿童对新事件的感知敏感的方法，研究婴儿对事件结构的知识如何与语言论证结构相对应。他们还将研究知觉和认知机制对婴儿事件表征的潜在贡献，以及语言习得如何影响婴儿事件知识。通过记录头皮上的电位，研究人员大致了解了婴儿大脑中感知事件结构的代表位置。这种方法和研究问题的结合可以独特地告知我们婴儿如何在他们对事件的认知表征和语言习得过程之间形成桥梁。这项工作将增加关于人类认知和语言功能如何在生命的早期阶段发展的知识。

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Scherff and her advisor Dr. Perfetti will conduct a year long investigation of the possibility that prelinguistic infants identify the same kinds of structures in observed events that languages identify with verb argument structure. The verb argument structure is a highly constrained format for describing events in language. Infants' ability to map events in the world onto concepts such as "give" and "hug" raises questions about both the structure of language and of event perception. As adults, we implicitly identify discrete events from a scene of complex and even ambiguous interactions among objects. Further, we verbally characterize these events in remarkably consistent ways, relating our cognitive representations of events to our linguistic representations of events. The difficulty in this process is that while the world of conceivable events may be fairly unconstrained, language itself is a highly constrained format for representing events. How then, do infants acquiring language learn to map the less constrained world onto highly constrained linguistic structures? Scherff and Perfetti will investigate infant event perception and the acquisition of verb argument structure in preverbal infants (10-12 months) and infants just beginning to produce word combinations (18-20 months). Their project focuses on whether infants' conceptually categorize events based on the number of obligatory participants, an operation that might be critical for acquiring verbs with different argument structure. Using methods sensitive to a child's perception of novel events, Scherff and Perfetti will examine how infants' knowledge of event structures correspond to linguistic argument structures. They will also examine the underlying contributions of perceptual and cognitive mechanisms to infants' event representations and how language acquisition impacts infant event knowledge. By recording electrical potentials at the scalp, the investigators gain a rough idea of where in the infant brain perceived events structures are represented.This combination of methodologies and research questions can uniquely inform our understanding of how infants form bridges between their cognitive representations of events and the language acquisition process. This work will increase knowledge about how the cognitive and language functions of humans develop in the very early stages of life.