Doctoral Dissertation Research: Finding Interrogativity

语言是用来执行各种各样的交际行为-提供信息，提出问题，提出请求，等等，在任何语言中，都有特定的信号，以句子的形式，表明它通常用于什么交际行为。但这些信号因语言而异。这个项目研究了儿童如何学习识别与他们说话的人的交际行为，同时学习与这些行为相关的表面信号。具体来说，这个项目调查了孩子们是如何联想到疑问句的（“你想要一块饼干吗？”）提问。将疑问句映射到问题提出了有趣的习得挑战。首先，孩子们需要弄清楚他们语言中疑问句的形式：虽然所有语言都倾向于有专门的疑问句，但这些疑问句的句法构成不同：在英语中，疑问句通常在词序上与陈述句不同（例如“你想要一块饼干吗”与“我想要一块饼干”），但在普通话中则不然。为了弄清楚他们语言中疑问句的形式，孩子们需要注意疑问句的形式。但是，孩子们是如何分辨出哪一个是重要的，他们又是如何将小句类型与它们的规范功能联系起来的呢？其次，孩子们需要弄清楚说话者何时提出问题（而不是提出断言或请求）。但是，如果他们还不能依靠这些行为通常使用的形式，他们怎么能这样做呢？以往的研究表明，尽管任务的复杂性，儿童理解疑问句和他们的约定功能的问题之前，三岁。为了研究儿童如何解决这个复杂的映射问题，这个项目研究了如何在言语中向儿童提问，使用什么形式，比较英语和普通话：父母如何提问有多少形式上的规律性？说话者的行为中是否有语言外的暗示可以泄露疑问（例如，谈话中的停顿或注意力的集中）？该项目测试的假设，儿童学习识别言语行为（问题）和子句类型（疑问）串联和相互信息的方式：儿童学习识别疑问通过跟踪正式的提问，结合他们的疑问及其相关的社会线索的知识不断增长;同样，他们识别问题通过跟踪社会线索结合他们的疑问句法的不断增长的理解。该项目将包括两个语料库研究和一个计算模型：研究1研究英语父母与孩子之间的对话，研究2普通话父母与孩子之间的对话，父母的话语将被注释为语用，韵律和句法特征。注释的数据，然后将被用来测试这种实用的句法自举假设的可行性，通过计算建模（研究3）。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

Language is used to perform various kinds of communicative acts - providing information, asking questions, making requests, etc. In any language, there are specific signals in the form of a sentence that indicates what communicative act it is typically used for. But these signals vary from language to language. This project examines how children learn to identify the communicative acts of the people speaking to them while learning the surface signals associated with these acts. Specifically, this project investigates how children come to associate interrogatives ("Do you want a cookie?") to questions. Mapping interrogatives to questions present interesting acquisition challenges. First, children need to figure out the form of interrogative clauses in their language: while all languages tend to have dedicated clauses for questions, the syntactic makeup of these interrogatives differ: in English, interrogatives usually differ from declaratives in word order (e.g. "Do you want a cookie" vs. "I want a cookie"), but not in Mandarin. To figure out the form of their language’s interrogatives, children need to notice regularities in form. But how do children figure out which regularities matter, and how do they associate clause types with their canonical function? Second, children need to figure out when speakers are asking questions (vs. making assertions or requests). But how can they do so, if they can’t yet rely on the forms typically used for these acts? Previous research shows that, despite the complexity of the task, children understand interrogatives and their conventionalized function as questions before age three. To investigate how children solve this complex mapping problem, this project examines how questions are asked in speech to children, using what forms, comparing English and Mandarin: how much formal regularity is there in how parents ask questions? And are there extralinguistic cues in speakers’ behavior that can give away questionhood (e.g., pauses in conversation or focus of attention)? The project tests the hypothesis that children learn to identify speech act (question) and clause type (interrogative) in tandem and mutually informative ways: children learn to identify interrogatives by tracking formal regularities in conjunction with their growing knowledge of questionhood and its associated social cues; similarly, they identify questions by tracking social cues in conjunction with their growing understanding of interrogative syntax. The project will consist of two corpus studies and one computational model: Study 1 examines conversations between English-speaking parent-child dyads and Study 2 conversations between Mandarin parent-child dyads, where parent utterances will be annotated for pragmatic, prosodic, and syntactic features. The annotated data will then be used to test the viability of this pragmatic syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis via computational modeling (Study 3).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.