From Words to Inferences: The Development of Incremental Language Comprehension

几十年的研究表明，成人听者能够迅速整合多种信息，从而找出话语中词语之间的句法和语义关系。然而，对儿童语言加工的研究仍处于初级阶段。这在很大程度上是因为大多数用于研究成人理解的方法都涉及阅读或次要任务，这些任务对年幼的孩子来说太难了。近年来，这种情况发生了变化：几位研究人员证明，儿童的眼球运动可以提供有关口语理解过程中每时每刻的详细信息。本项目将在这些初步发现的基础上，使用眼睛凝视范式来研究2至7岁儿童的句法和语义过程。这些研究考察了两个具体的问题：1)儿童使用什么信息来确定话语的句法结构？儿童对歧义句子的理解将被用来探索词汇知识和语篇语境的作用。2)在语言理解过程中使用了哪些语法表征？启动范式将被用来探索儿童在找出不同名词在句子中的角色时所使用的句法和语义类别的广度。虽然语言理解系统的发展本身是重要的，但这项研究也将为儿童的句法表征、成人语言加工的结构以及单词学习和句法发展之间的关系提供洞察。良好的语言理解能力对认知和社会发展至关重要，口语是幼儿社会化和受教育的主要手段。他们对遥远的地方、家庭关系和抽象实体的了解很大程度上是通过听成年人的话来实现的。识字还建立在儿童理解口语的能力上，学龄前语言理解和后来的阅读能力之间的牢固联系证明了这一点。通过追踪这些语言理解过程从两岁开始的发展，这项研究可能会提供一些洞察为什么一些儿童在理解方面似乎有很大的困难，以及可以做些什么来促进这些技能的发展。此外，该项目进行的研究将为一名博士后研究员、一名研究生和几名本科生提供教育机会。

Decades of research has demonstrated that adult listeners rapidly integrate many kinds of information to figure out the syntactic and semantic relations between words in an utterance. The study of children's language processing, however, is still in its infancy. This is largely because most of the methods used to study adult comprehension involve reading or secondary tasks that are too difficult for young children. In recent years this has changed: several researchers have demonstrated that children's eye-movements can provide detailed information about the moment-to-moment processes involved in spoken-language comprehension. The present project will build on these initial findings, using the eye-gaze paradigm to investigate syntactic and semantic processes in children from 2 to 7 years of age. The studies examine two specific questions: 1) What information do children use to determine the syntactic structure of an utterance? Children's interpretation of ambiguous sentences will be used to explore the roles of word knowledge and discourse context. 2) What kinds of grammatical representations are used during language comprehension? A priming paradigm will be used to explore the breadth of the syntactic and semantic categories that children employ as they figure out the roles of different nouns in a sentence. While the development of the language comprehension system is of importance in its own right, this work will also provide insight into children's syntactic representations, the architecture of adult language processing, and the relation between word learning and syntactic development.This research will map out the development of higher-level language comprehension processes. Strong language comprehension skills are essential to cognitive and social development and spoken language is the primary means by which young children are socialized and educated. Their knowledge of distant places, family relations, and abstract entities comes about largely by listening to adults. Literacy also builds upon children's ability to understand spoken language, as evidenced by robust connections between preschool language comprehension and later reading abilities. By tracing the development of these language comprehension processes from two years of age, this research may provide insight into why some children seem to have great difficulties in comprehension and what can be done to facilitate the development of these skills. In addition, the research undertaken in this project will provide educational opportunities for a postdoctoral fellow, a graduate student and several undergraduate students.