EAPSI: Do Abstract Syntactic Representations Help Adult Second Language Learners Acquire Novel Word Types?

有些词不能直接翻译成其他语言。例如，一个说英语的人会说“John heard that Bill表扬了自己/他”，这取决于被表扬的是谁，而一个说日语的人会粗略地说“John-ga Bill-wa praise self heard-that”，意思是约翰或比尔被表扬了。他、他自己和日本人的自我都是回指的例子，这些词指的是已经提到的语言信息（例如比尔或约翰）。回指的使用部分受到普遍的句法原则的限制，但也受到语言特定规则的限制。这个项目调查了学习者是否能从仅仅接触这些跨语言变化的结构中发展出像母语一样的理解，如果是这样，什么信息是相关的和有影响的。该项目由研究人员与津田学院（Tsuda College）的小野元（Hajime Ono）博士合作开展，将形成一个跨语言数据集，使研究人员能够更好地了解哪些语言因素会增强或削弱成年人学习新单词和语法结构的能力。从这个项目的结果应该提供洞察力的信息，特别是相关的或有影响力的帮助成年人学习一门新语言。本项目旨在更好地理解语言学习机制的本质，以及抽象的句法表征是否可以用来获得对新回指的正确解释。日语和英语的回指都受到普遍原则的约束，但也必须学习特定语言的参数。该项目使用了由获奖者开发的一种新的语言学习任务来测试学习机制是否可以跟踪词形、句法表征和基于上下文的解释的重复共现，以便将该词形映射到正确的回指类型，这将增加我们对句法表征在语言习得过程中的作用的理解。该奖项隶属于东亚和太平洋暑期研究所项目，由美国国家科学基金会和日本科学促进会共同资助，支持一名美国研究生进行暑期研究。

Some words do not directly translate into other languages. For example, where an English speaker would say either "John heard that Bill praised himself/him," depending on who is being praised, a Japanese speaker would say roughly "John-ga Bill-wa praised self heard-that," and mean either John or Bill was being praised. Him, himself, and the Japanese self are examples of anaphora, words that refer back to already-mentioned linguistic information (e.g. Bill or John). The use of anaphora is partly constrained by universal, syntactic principles, but also language-specific rules. This project investigates whether learners can develop native-like understanding of these cross-linguistically varied constructions from mere exposure, and if so what information is relevant and influential. This project, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Hajime Ono at Tsuda College, will form a cross-linguistic data-set that will allow the researchers to better understand the linguistic factors that enhance or reduce adults' ability to learn new words and grammatical constructions. Results from this project should provide insight into the kind of information that is especially relevant or influential in helping adults learn a new language. This project seeks to better understand the nature of language learning mechanisms, and whether abstract syntactic representations can be used to acquire the correct interpretations of novel anaphora. Anaphora in both Japanese and English are constrained by universal principles, but language-specific parameters must also be learned. This project uses a novel language learning task developed by the awardee to test if the learning mechanism can track repeated co-occurrences of a word-form, syntactic representation, and context-based interpretations in order to map that word-form to the correct anaphora type, which will increase our understanding of the role of syntactic representations in the language acquisition process.This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.