Transitivity of Sentences and Scenes in Early Language Development

孩子们在几年内就学会了他们的第一语言，而且没有经过明确的考虑。他们的任务极其复杂。他们必须逐渐感觉到无数的手势或声音具有句子的结构，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述他们周围的世界的，因为它是由他们的照顾者和同龄人生活和描绘的。他们怎么做到这一点的？回答这个问题需要了解他们在发展的每个阶段如何体验他们周围的语言和世界。这项研究针对问题的一个核心部分：婴儿如何学习及物动词的意义，即有主语和宾语的及物动词？这个项目从两个方向来解决这个问题。首先，2岁以下的儿童能正确感知“及物动词”这一范畴吗？这可能很困难，因为这样的动词可能出现在各种不同的上下文中，模糊了它们的类别，比如直接宾语出现在句子开头的问题：“Mary看到了什么？”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或不突出的？有了这两个问题的一些答案，该项目继续询问孩子们对及物动词的句法和它们的意义之间的联系有什么期望，这可能有助于他们学习。这项研究将加深我们对语言表征和非语言表征之间的关系的理解，以及这些关系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句法习得研究中没有使用过的方法，扩大了其他方法的适用范围。还将致力于开展外展活动，在这些活动中，从事该项目的研究生和本科生将与高中生和中学生接触，讨论一般语言研究的重要性，以及可以从对婴儿语言学习者的研究中吸取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.