Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Developing the Vocabulary of Space

该奖项是美国国家科学基金会社会、行为和经济科学（SBE）博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）计划的一部分。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行为期两年的培训，并鼓励博士后进行独立研究。美国国家科学基金会寻求促进科学界各阶层的科学家，包括那些未被充分代表的群体的科学家，参与其研究项目和活动；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的一个重要的专业发展阶段。每个博士后必须解决各自学科领域的重要科学问题。在宾夕法尼亚大学的约翰·特鲁斯韦尔博士和约翰·霍普金斯大学的芭芭拉·兰道博士的赞助下，这项博士后奖学金支持一位研究儿童如何处理空间关系基础词汇的早期职业科学家。词汇习得是儿童早期发展的一个基本组成部分，对儿童的大脑皮层发育和学业成就有着深远的影响。这里提出的研究调查了正常发育的儿童如何获得他们早期词汇的一个重要方面：表示空间关系的术语（例如“on”或“in”）。了解儿童如何处理空间关系下的词汇，将有助于对理解空间词汇有困难的儿童，如发育性语言障碍（DLD）或类似语言迟缓的儿童进行有针对性的干预。我们研究了两个基本的区别：一个是包容和支持之间的区别，另一个是支持的子类型之间的区别：核心支持关系（如自下而上的支持）和非核心支持关系（如悬挂式连接）。我们问孩子们是如何在他们的母语中学习这些区别背后的词汇项目的意义的。具体来说，我们通过测量微妙的语言差异是否会影响成人和儿童对描绘核心和非核心关系的图像的眼球运动，来调查儿童是否能像成年人一样快速、实时地处理这种区别。此外，我们调查了儿童非成人作品的来源。我们问为什么孩子们在描述复杂的空间关系时似乎没有使用成人通常使用的词汇动词（例如，说“the picture is on the wall”，而成年人更经常说“the picture is hang on the wall”）。我们假设儿童仍在发育的抑制控制系统是造成这种差异的原因，并在冲突适应范式中直接验证了这一点。这项工作将汇集两个丰富但不同的研究领域：空间关系的研究和人类句子处理的研究。最终，这项工作的目标是填补该领域目前的知识空白：儿童如何处理编码他们周围世界中事物位置的语言。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. John Trueswell at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Barbara Landau at Johns Hopkins University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining how children process the vocabulary that underlies spatial relations. Vocabulary acquisition is a fundamental component of early childhood development, and has far reaching implications, predicting cortical growth and academic achievement as children age. The research proposed here investigates how typically-developing children acquire an important aspect of their early vocabulary: terms denoting spatial relations (e.g. “on” or “in”). Understanding how children process the vocabulary underlying spatial relations will allow for targeted interventions for children who have difficulty understanding spatial vocabulary, such as children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or similar language delays.We look at two fundamental distinctions: one between containment and support and one between sub-types of support: core support relations (such as support-from-below) and non-core ones (such as attachment-by-hanging). We ask how children come to learn the meaning of the lexical items underlying these distinctions in their native language(s). Specifically, we investigate whether children process this distinction rapidly, in real time (as adults do) by measuring whether subtle linguistic distinctions affect adults’ and children’s eye-movements to images depicting core and non-core relations. Furthermore, we investigate the source of children’s non-adultlike productions. We ask why children appear to describe complex spatial relations without the lexical verbs adults generally use (e.g. saying “The picture is on the wall” while adults more often say “The picture is hanging on the wall”). We hypothesize that children’s still-developing inhibitory control system is to blame for this difference, and test this directly in a conflict adaptation paradigm. This work will bring together two rich but disparate areas of study: work on spatial relations and work on the development of human sentence processing. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to fill a gap in knowledge the field has currently: how children process the language that encodes where things are in 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.