Development and adaptation of active dependency completion mechanisms

主动依赖完成机制的开发和调整

• 批准号: 1737736
• 负责人: Richard Wright
• 金额: $ 15.83万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-04-15 至 2018-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1737736&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Development; adaptation; active; dependency; completion

Understanding how children learn to comprehend language as efficiently as adults do is a central goal for theories of both normal and abnormal language acquisition. Developmental research has shown that, while much linguistic knowledge develops in the first few years of life, children are not necessarily adept at quickly using this knowledge during real-time language comprehension. For example, as sentences unfold, adult listeners and readers are able to continuously predict how the sentences are likely to continue, based on their knowledge of language or the distribution of sentence structures. However, children's prediction mechanisms sometimes diverge from those of adults, and they must somehow develop adult-like predictive mechanisms during the course of language acquisition. Understanding this developmental process could lead to advances in the pedagogical techniques that aim to enhance language comprehension in children. This may also improve clinical intervention methodologies for adult patients with language disorders, whose comprehension mechanisms show similar characteristics to those of children's.This project investigates the development and adaptation of filler-gap dependency processing mechanisms in children and adults. In comprehending questions like "What was Emily eating the cake with -- ?," adults incrementally complete the dependency by associating the dislocated wh-phrase "what" with the verb, but children wait to complete the dependency until after the verb and its object is encountered. The main hypothesis of this project is that language experience and distributional regularities in the input play a key role in the development and adaptation of predictive processes in filler-gap dependency completion. The motivation for this hypothesis is two-fold. First, it is well established in developmental psychology that distributional regularities can bootstrap children's cognitive and linguistic development. Second, much work in adult psycholinguistics research has argued that syntactic priming, a processing facilitation that results from repetitions of abstract syntactic structures, reflects an implicit learning mechanism that adapts the comprehension procedures in accordance with the recent language experience. Taken together, children's comprehension mechanisms may adapt to an adult-like mechanism based on a) a long-term accumulation of filler-gap dependencies that complete at the verb position, as well as b) syntactic priming of such filler-gap dependencies within an experimental session. Conversely, adults' comprehension mechanisms should also adapt to the child-like, conservative mechanism after exposure to filler-gap dependencies that are completed at a post-verbal position. To test these predictions, Dr. Omaki will conduct i) a corpus study that investigates the distributional patterns of English filler-gap dependencies in adults' conversations and child-directed speech, and ii) five eye-tracking experiments with children and adults that explore the time course of filler-gap dependency processing, as well as its interaction with priming sentences that are designed to create a bias towards the alternative dependency completion mechanism. As such, this project links questions and methodologies in two traditionally separate fields of adult psycholinguistics and language development.

理解儿童如何像成人一样有效地学习理解语言是正常和异常语言习得理论的核心目标。发展研究表明，虽然许多语言知识是在生命的最初几年发展起来的，但儿童并不一定善于在实时语言理解过程中快速使用这些知识。例如，随着句子的展开，成年听众和读者能够根据他们的语言知识或句子结构的分布，不断预测句子可能如何继续。然而，儿童的预测机制有时与成人的预测机制不同，他们必须在语言习得过程中以某种方式发展类似成人的预测机制。了解这一发展过程可能会导致旨在提高儿童语言理解能力的教学技术的进步。这也可能会改善临床干预方法，为成人患者的语言障碍，其理解机制表现出类似的特点，儿童的。该项目调查的发展和适应的填料间隙依赖处理机制的儿童和成人。在理解“艾米丽吃蛋糕时用的是什么？”成年人通过将错位的wh短语“what”与动词相关联来逐渐完成依赖关系，但儿童等待直到遇到动词及其宾语之后才完成依赖关系。该项目的主要假设是，语言经验和输入中的分布性记忆在填补空缺依赖完成的预测过程的发展和适应中起着关键作用。这一假设的动机是双重的。首先，在发展心理学中已经确立，分布性的语言可以促进儿童的认知和语言发展。第二，成人心理语言学的大量研究认为，句法启动是一种由抽象句法结构重复产生的加工促进机制，反映了一种内隐学习机制，它根据最近的语言经验调整理解过程。综上所述，儿童的理解机制可能会适应一个类似成人的机制，基于a）一个长期积累的填充空缺的依赖性，完成在动词的位置，以及B）句法启动这种填充空缺的依赖性在一个实验会话。相反，成年人的理解机制也应该适应儿童般的，保守的机制暴露后，填补空缺的依赖性，完成在一个后言语的位置。为了验证这些预测，Omaki博士将进行i）一项语料库研究，调查成人对话和儿童指导演讲中英语填充空缺依赖的分布模式，ii）五项儿童和成人的眼动追踪实验，探索填充空缺依赖处理的时间过程，以及它与启动句子的相互作用，这些启动句子被设计成产生对替代依赖完成机制的偏向。因此，该项目将成人心理语言学和语言发展这两个传统上独立的领域的问题和方法联系起来。