Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Developing the Vocabulary of Space

该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济科学(SBE)博士后研究奖学金(SPRF)计划的一部分提供的。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职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每个博士后研究员都必须解决推动各自学科领域向前发展的重要科学问题。在宾夕法尼亚大学的约翰·特鲁斯韦尔博士和约翰斯·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名早期职业科学家研究儿童如何处理构成空间关系的词汇。词汇习得是儿童早期发展的一个基本组成部分，对儿童大脑皮质发育和学习成绩具有深远的预测作用。这项研究旨在调查典型发育儿童是如何习得其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背后的词汇，将为理解空间词汇有困难的儿童提供有针对性的干预，如发展性语言障碍儿童或类似的语言迟缓儿童。我们考察了两个基本区别：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(如自下而上的支持关系)和非核心支持关系(如上吊依恋关系)。我们问孩子们是如何学会母语中这些差异背后的词条的意义的(S)。具体地说，我们通过测量细微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动，来调查儿童是否实时地快速处理这种区别(就像成年人做的那样)。此外，我们还探讨了儿童非成人化生产的来源。我们问，为什么儿童似乎描述复杂的空间关系，而没有成年人通常使用的词汇动词(例如，说“图片挂在墙上”，而成年人更常说“图片挂在墙上”)。我们假设儿童仍在发育中的抑制性控制系统是这种差异的罪魁祸首，并直接在冲突适应范式中进行了检验。这项工作将汇集两个丰富但不同的研究领域：空间关系工作和人类句子处理发展工作。最终，这项工作的目标是填补该领域目前知识的空白：儿童如何处理编码他们周围世界中事物的位置的语言。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。

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.