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Acquisition of variation in child language learners

儿童语言学习者变异的习得

基本信息

批准号：
2043724
负责人：
Kathryn Schuler
金额：
$ 19.22万
依托单位：
University of Pennsylvania
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2021
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2021-09-01 至 2025-02-28
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2043724&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Acquisition variation child language learners

项目摘要

Children exhibit a remarkable capacity to acquire whatever language (or languages) they are exposed to without any formal linguistic instruction. When one thinks of learning a language, one often thinks of learning new vocabulary words and grammatical rules. However, another important aspect of language acquisition that is particularly under-studied is how children come to acquire variation in natural language. Mastering a language to fluency requires learning more complex and subtle dependencies in the linguistic and social environment. For example, whether an English speaker produces "went shopping" versus "wen' shoppin'" may be determined by many factors, some of which are internal to the utterance (e.g., nearby sounds or the expression's syntactic position in the larger grammatical context) whereas others are external (e.g., social context and speaker identity). In the context of language learning, children must learn and master the use of these variable forms, applying them in the same contexts and at the same rates as other speakers of their dialect. The proposed research addresses a paradox in how children acquire such variation. In established language communities, children acquire such variation--mastering the relevant articulatory, grammatical and social conditioning factors from a very young age. On the other hand, children in emerging languages communities will frequently regularize variable forms, removing variation to create a more regular or learnable linguistic system.The experiments comprising this research address why, when confronted with variability in their primary linguistic data, children sometimes learn variation and its conditioning factors, and other times regularize it. Using recent findings, this project examines the hypothesis that particular properties of the language input may lead children to match variation in one case but regularize in another. In particular, (1) whether the variation is conditioned on a grammatical or social context, (2) the fluency of the language model, and (3) whether the input is provided by a community of speakers. The project employs methods from the Artificial Language Learning paradigm--an innovative method that enables researchers to conduct language learning experiments with children in a single 30-minute session. The experiments investigate whether the hypothesized properties of the input lead children to adjust their learning behavior, acquiring variation under some circumstances and regularizing variation under others. The proposed work serve as a foundation upon which further, more nuanced hypotheses about the acquisition of variation in children can be built, as well as provide an innovative experimental approach with which researchers can empirically investigate other important (but still only theoretically explored) questions in child language acquisitionThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

儿童表现出一种非凡的能力，即在没有任何正式语言教学的情况下习得他们所接触的任何语言（或多种语言）。当一个人想到学习一门语言时，他经常想到学习新的词汇和语法规则。然而，语言习得的另一个重要方面，特别是研究不足的是儿童如何获得自然语言的变化。掌握一门语言的流利程度需要学习语言和社会环境中更复杂和微妙的依赖关系。例如，英语说话者是否发出“went shopping”与“wen'shoppin'”可以由许多因素确定，其中一些因素是话语内部的（例如，附近的声音或表达在更大语法上下文中的句法位置）而其他是外部的（例如，社会语境和说话人身份）。在语言学习的背景下，儿童必须学习和掌握这些可变形式的使用，将它们应用于相同的语境中，并以相同的速度使用他们的方言。拟议的研究解决了儿童如何获得这种变化的悖论。在既定的语言社区中，儿童从很小的时候就掌握了相关的发音、语法和社会条件因素。另一方面，在新兴语言社区中的儿童会频繁地调整可变形式，去除变异以创建更规则或更可学习的语言系统。包括本研究的实验解决了为什么当面对其主要语言数据的变异时，儿童有时会学习变异及其制约因素，而其他时候则会调整它。使用最近的研究结果，本研究旨在探讨语言输入的特殊性质可能导致儿童在一种情况下匹配变异，而在另一种情况下规则化的假设。具体而言，（1）是否变化是以语法或社会背景为条件，（2）语言模型的流畅性，以及（3）输入是否由说话者社区提供。该项目采用了人工语言学习范式的方法，这是一种创新方法，使研究人员能够在30分钟的时间内对儿童进行语言学习实验。实验研究输入的假设属性是否会导致儿童调整他们的学习行为，在某些情况下获得变化，在其他情况下规则化变化。拟议的工作作为一个基础，在此基础上，进一步，更细致入微的假设有关收购的变化，在儿童可以建立，并提供了一种创新的实验方法，研究人员可以凭经验研究其他重要的（但仍只是理论上的探索）这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。