CAREER: Investigating the Noun Bias in Early Language Acquisition

职业：研究早期语言习得中的名词偏差

• 批准号: 2238609
• 负责人: Marisa Casillas
• 金额: $ 52.25万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-04-15 至 2028-03-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2238609&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Investigating; Noun; Bias; Early

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.

人类语言极其多样化，但世界各地的儿童在语言学习过程中却表现出一些惊人的相似之处。识别不同学习环境中发生的相似性非常重要，因为这种相似性为语言的进化基础提供了证据——是什么使人类（但不是其他动物）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。该职业项目通过检查两种不相关语言的早期单词学习，研究如何在上下文中灵活调整学习的一致性。这些发现有助于制定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的儿童语言学习详细理论。该项目促进了对下一代学者的培训，以进行比较性跨语言研究，并创建供社区和公众使用的教育资源。在多种语言中，儿童的第一个单词更可能指的是物体而不是动作，这种跨语言相似性通俗地称为“名词偏见”。该项目调查了高度以名词为中心的语言和文化以及更加以动词为中心的语言和文化中这种偏见的根源和强度。研究结果揭示了哪些经历使儿童在早期发展过程中或多或少更容易关注名词和类似名词的单词。一方面，语言本身的结构可以将孩子的注意力引向名词。另一方面，成人与孩子交流的方式也可能将他们的注意力集中在名词上。通过使用比较跨语言方法，包括自发对话、眼球追踪和新词学习测试，这项研究查明了名词偏见的本质，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。这些发现深入了解了语言进化基础的一个关键部分：儿童如何偏见地理解和标记周围的世界。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Little evidence for a noun bias in Tseltal spontaneous speech

• DOI: 10.1177/01427237231216571
• 发表时间: 2024-01-09
• 期刊: FIRST LANGUAGE
• 影响因子: 1.9
• 作者: Casillas，Marisa;Foushee，Ruthe;Brown，Penelope
• 通讯作者: Brown，Penelope