Transitivity of Sentences and Scenes in Early Language Development

孩子们在几年内学会了他们的第一语言，没有明确的考虑。他们的任务极其复杂。他们必须把无数的手势或声音理解为句子的结构，有主语、动词等等。与此同时，他们必须理解这些句子是如何描绘他们周围的世界的，就像他们的照顾者和同龄人所生活和描绘的那样。他们是怎么做到的？回答这个问题需要了解他们在发展的每个阶段是如何体验语言和周围世界的。这项研究的目标是这个问题的一个核心部分：婴儿如何学习及物动词的意义，那些有主语和宾语的动词？这个项目从两个方向着手解决这个问题。首先，2岁以下的儿童能否正确感知及物动词的范畴？这可能比较困难，因为这类动词可能出现在各种模糊其类别的上下文中，例如直接宾语出现在句子开头的问题：“What did Mary see?”第二，这个年龄段的孩子倾向于如何表现他们周围的事件？事件的哪些方面对他们来说是突出的，哪些方面不是？有了这两个问题的一些答案后，该项目继续询问孩子们对及物动词的语法及其含义之间的联系有什么期望，这些期望可能有助于他们的学习。这项研究将加深我们对语言表征和非语言表征之间关系的理解，以及这些表征在语言发展的早期阶段是如何变化的。此外，这项工作采用了以前在语法习得研究中没有使用过的方法，扩大了其他人可用的方法范围。此外，研究人员还将大力开展外展活动，让参与该项目的研究生和本科生与高中生和中学生一起探讨语言学研究的重要性，以及从幼儿语言学习者研究中可以得出的更广泛的社会教训。

Children acquire their first language within a few years, and without explicit deliberation. Their task is extremely complex. They must come to perceive countless gestures or sounds as having the structure of sentences, with subjects, verbs, and so on. At the same time, they must come to understand how these sentences depict the world around them, as it is lived and portrayed by their caretakers and peers. How do they do this? Answering this question requires understanding how they experience both the language and the world around them, at each stage of their development. This research aims at one central part of the problem: how do infants learn the meanings of transitive verbs, those with a subject and object? This project approaches the problem from two directions. First, can children younger than 2 correctly perceive the category of 'transitive verb'? This may be difficult, because such verbs may occur in a variety of contexts that obscure their category, such as questions where the direct object occurs at the start of the sentence: "What did Mary see?" Second, how do children at this age tend to represent the events around them? Which aspects of an event are or are not salient to them? With some answers to both questions, the project moves on to asking what expectations children have about the connection between the syntax of transitive verbs and their meanings, expectations that might help them learn. This research will deepen our understanding of the relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic representations, and how these change in the early stages of language development. Moreover, this work employs methods not previously used in research on the acquisition of syntax, expanding the range of methods available for others. Significant effort will also be directed towards outreach events in which graduate and undergraduate students working on the project will engage with high school and middle school students about the importance of linguistic research in general, and about the broader societal lessons that can be drawn from research on infant language learners.