Doctoral Dissertation Research: Finding Interrogativity

语言被用来执行各种交际行为--提供信息、提出问题、提出请求等。在任何语言中，都有特定的句子形式的信号，表明它通常用于什么交际行为。但这些信号因语言的不同而不同。这个项目考察了儿童如何学习识别与他们交谈的人的交流行为，同时学习与这些行为相关的表面信号。具体地说，这个项目调查了儿童是如何将疑问句(“你想要饼干吗？”)联系起来的。回答问题。将疑问句映射到疑问句带来了有趣的习得挑战。首先，孩子们需要弄清楚疑问句在他们的语言中的形式：虽然所有的语言都有专门的疑问句，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，疑问句和陈述句)。《你想要饼干吗？》VS“我想要一块饼干”)，但不是普通话。为了弄清楚他们的语言疑问句的形式，儿童需要注意形式上的规律性。但孩子们如何弄清楚哪些规则很重要，以及他们如何将从句类型与他们的规范功能联系起来？其次，孩子们需要弄清楚说话者何时在提问(而不是提出断言或请求)。但如果他们还不能依靠通常用于这些行为的形式，他们怎么能做到这一点呢？先前的研究表明，尽管这项任务很复杂，但儿童在三岁之前就能理解疑问句及其常规功能。为了调查孩子是如何解决这个复杂的映射问题的，这个项目调查了在向孩子讲话时，如何使用什么形式提出问题，并比较了英语和普通话：父母提问的形式有多正式？说话者的行为中是否存在语言外的暗示，可能会暴露出疑问(例如，谈话中的停顿或注意力的集中)？该项目检验了一种假设，即儿童学习以同步和互为信息的方式识别言语行为(疑问句)和从句类型(疑问句)：儿童通过跟踪形式规则，结合他们对疑问及其相关的社会线索的日益增长的知识，学习识别疑问句；类似地，他们通过跟踪社会线索，结合他们对疑问句句法的日益理解来识别问题。该项目将由两个语料库研究和一个计算模型组成：研究1考察说英语的亲子二人组之间的对话，研究2考察普通话亲子二人组之间的对话，其中父母话语将被注释为语用、韵律和句法特征。然后，注释的数据将被用于通过计算模型(研究3)来测试这一语用句法自举假说的可行性。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.