CAREER: Investigating the Noun Bias in Early Language Acquisition

人类的语言是惊人的多样化，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。识别不同学习环境中出现的相似性很重要，因为这些相似性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CAREER项目通过研究两种不相关语言的早期单词学习，研究了在上下文中学习的灵活性。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。该项目促进了对下一代学者的培训，以进行跨语言比较研究，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有可能指的是物体而不是动作，这种跨语言的相似性被通俗地称为“名词偏见”。这个项目调查了这种偏见的来源和强度，在一个高度以名词为中心的语言和文化和一个更以动词为中心的语言和文化。研究结果揭示了什么样的经历使儿童在早期发展过程中更容易或更少地关注名词和名词类单词。一方面，语言本身的结构可以将儿童的注意力指向名词。另一方面，成人与儿童交流的方式也可能将他们的注意力指向名词。通过使用比较跨语言的方法，包括自发的对话，眼动跟踪，和测试的新词学习，本研究查明了名词偏见的性质，并加深了理解它是如何适应特定的语言和文化的孩子的家庭环境。该研究结果揭示了语言进化基础的一个关键部分：儿童如何有偏见地理解和标记他们周围的世界。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。

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.