CAREER: Investigating the Noun Bias in Early Language Acquisition

人类语言的多样性令人震惊，但世界各地的儿童在语言学习过程中表现出一些惊人的相似之处。重要的是要找出在不同的学习环境中出现的相似之处，因为这种相似之处为语言的进化基础提供了证据--是什么使人类(而不是其他动物)能够学习人类语言。然而，语言和文化的多样性意味着人类婴儿必须在很大程度上使他们的语言行为适应他们的家庭环境。这个职业项目通过考察两种不相关语言的早期单词学习，调查学习中的一致性如何在语境中灵活地适应。这些发现有助于发展详细的儿童语言学习理论，适用于教育和临床环境中来自不同文化和语言背景的儿童。该项目推进了对下一代学者进行跨语言比较研究的培训，并创建了供社区和公众使用的教育资源。在多种语言中，儿童的第一个词更有可能指物体而不是动作，这种跨语言相似性被俗称为“名词偏见”。这个项目调查了高度以名词为中心的语言和文化以及以动词为中心的语言和文化中这种偏见的来源和强度。这些结果揭示了是什么经历使儿童在早期发展过程中或多或少有可能专注于名词和类似名词的单词。一方面，语言本身的结构可以使儿童的注意力集中在名词上。另一方面，成年人与儿童交流的方式也可能将他们的注意力集中在名词上。通过使用包括自发对话、眼球跟踪和新单词学习测试在内的跨语言比较方法，本研究明确了名词偏见的性质，并加深了对它如何适应儿童家庭环境的特定语言和文化的理解。这些发现洞察了语言进化基础的一个关键部分：儿童是如何偏见地理解和标记他们周围的世界的。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。

Human languages are staggeringly diverse, and yet children around the world display some striking similarities in the process of language learning. It is important to identify similarities that occur across diverse learning contexts because such similarities provide evidence for the evolutionary basis of language - what makes humans (but not other animals) capable of learning human languages. And yet diversity among languages and cultures implies that human infants must considerably adapt their language behaviors to their home environments. This CAREER project investigates how consistencies in learning are flexibly adapted in context by examining early word learning in two unrelated languages. The findings contribute to the development of detailed theories of child language learning that apply to children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds in educational and clinical settings. The project advances the training of the next generation of scholars to conduct comparative cross-linguistic research and creates educational resources for use by the community and the general public.Across multiple languages, children’s first words are more likely to refer to objects than actions, a cross-linguistic similarity that is colloquially called the “noun bias”. This project investigates the source and strength of this bias across a highly noun-centric language and culture and a more verb-centric language and culture. The results shed light on what experiences make children more or less likely to focus on nouns and noun-like words during early development. On the one hand, a language itself can be structured in a way that points children’s attention to nouns. On the other hand, the ways that adults communicate with children may also point their attention to nouns. By using a comparative cross-linguistic approach that includes spontaneous conversation, eye tracking, and tests of new word learning, this research pinpoints the nature of the noun bias and deepens understanding of how it is adapted for the specific language and culture of a child’s home environment. The findings yield insight into a key part of the evolutionary basis for language: how children are biased to understand and label the world around them.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.