The contributions of the environment and social interaction to language emergence

该奖项是美国国家科学基金会社会、行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）计划的一部分。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行为期两年的培训，并鼓励博士后进行独立研究。美国国家科学基金会寻求促进科学界各阶层的科学家，包括那些未被充分代表的群体的科学家，参与其研究项目和活动；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的一个重要的专业发展阶段。每个博士后必须解决各自学科领域的重要科学问题。在加州大学伯克利分校的Mahesh Srinivasan博士的赞助下，并与芝加哥大学的Terra Edwards博士合作，该博士后奖学金支持一位研究身体和社会互动在语言出现中的作用的早期职业科学家。在过去的几十年里，我们通过对缺乏传统语言模式的儿童进行惊人的自然观察，了解了语言的起源。这种情况经常发生在聋哑人群中，大多数聋哑儿童无法获得可感知的语言系统，如手语。尽管语言环境很差，孩子们还是发展出了系统的手势系统，被称为“手语”，用来交流。这些语言出现和变化的例子都归因于儿童自身学习机制的本质。但是，在语言出现领域中，还有一个社会和互动的维度尚未得到系统的探讨，特别是关于儿童和父母如何共同建立参照以及父母的社会和非语言反应在家庭手语系统发展中的作用。本研究旨在探讨聋哑儿童在不同的语言输入和环境中出现的语言，并将这种情况与家庭手语和聋人母语手语的情况进行比较。虽然在美国的聋盲成人社区中出现了一种新的手语（一种通过触觉通道进行交流的手语），但这种新语言尚未被儿童习得，只有一些聋盲儿童有机会学习这种语言。通过对聋盲儿童、手语儿童和聋人手语儿童的研究，我们可以提出以下理论问题：1)当听力正常、视力正常的父母与孩子对世界的感知经验存在较大差距时，他们如何在相互理解上趋同，建立共同的交流基础？手语儿童、在家手语儿童和聋盲儿童在沟通系统的发展方面比较如何？2)聋哑儿童在接受前驱性语言输入时，他们是如何根据自己的学习和感知需求来改变语言的？3)手语儿童和聋哑儿童在语言和意义上表现出什么样的假设？本研究计划将涉及多种方法，包括心理语言学实验、语言启发任务、语言编码和社会互动以及调查。这项研究还将告诉我们，父母的社交和非语言暗示是否对推动沟通系统的发展至关重要，并展示儿童如何改变他们的语言输入，使其更容易处理和学习。在这么小的年龄找到一群聋哑儿童是一个非常难得的机会，而且以前没有关于儿童习得母语的工作。在这个前所未有的社会疏远和孤立时期，聋哑儿童尤其受到极大影响。这项工作将告知教师和早期干预从业者如何最好地为聋哑儿童提供社会和语言输入。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan at University of California Berkeley, and in collaboration with Dr. Terra Edwards at University of Chicago, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the roles of the body and social interaction in language emergence. Over the last few decades, we have learned about the origins of language through stunning naturalistic observations of children who lack exposure to conventional language models. Such situations often arise within the deaf population, where the majority of deaf children do not have access to a perceptible linguistic system, like a sign language. Despite these impoverished linguistic environments, children develop systematic gestural systems, known as “homesign,” to communicate. These examples of language emergence and change have been attributed to the nature of children’s own learning mechanisms. But there is also a social and interactional dimension that has not been systematically explored within the field of language emergence, particularly with respect to how children and their parents jointly establish reference and the role of parents’ social and non-linguistic responses in the development of homesign systems. The proposed research addresses the emergence of language among DeafBlind children who vary in their access to language input and environments, and compares this situation with that of homesigners and deaf native signers. Although there is a new emerging protactile sign language (a sign language that is communicate within the tactile channel) within a community of DeafBlind adults in the US, this new language has not yet been acquired by children, and only some DeafBlind children have the opportunity to learn this language. Studying DeafBlind, homesigning, and deaf native signing children will allow us to ask the following theoretical questions: 1) When there is a large gap between a hearing, sighted parent and child’s perceptual experiences of the world, how do they converge on mutual understanding and establish common ground to communicate? How do signing, homesigning, and DeafBlind children compare in the development of their communication systems? 2) When DeafBlind children receive protactile language input, how do they change the language based on their learning and perceptual needs? 3) What kinds of assumption do homesigning and DeafBlind children exhibit about language and meaning? This research program will involve mixed methods, including psycholinguistic experiments, language elicitation tasks, coding of language and social interactions, and surveys. This research will also inform us whether parents’ social and non-linguistic cues are essential for driving the development of communication systems and demonstrate how children change their language input to make it easier to process and learn. It is an incredibly rare opportunity to find a cohort of DeafBlind children at a such a young age, and there is no previous work on children’s acquisition of protactile language. DeafBlind children, in particular, are greatly impacted during this unprecedented time of social distancing and isolation. This work will inform teachers and early intervention practitioners on how to best provide social and linguistic input for DeafBlind children.This 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.