Doctoral Dissertation Research: Computational Investigation of Extralinguistic Cognition in Developmental Parsing

在没有明确指导的情况下，孩子们学习语言的速度惊人：到5-6岁时，大多数孩子都能很好地说话和理解语言。当孩子们学习他们的语言时，其他认知系统，如记忆和抑制，也在发展。因为语言的发展依赖于这些额外的认知系统，这些发展系统产生的困难可能会影响儿童学习语言的能力。该项目使用计算工具来模拟句子理解的实时过程，以深入了解发展记忆和抑制如何影响儿童的语言理解。这个项目是理解发展中的认知系统如何影响儿童的语言学习，以及这些系统的差异如何影响儿童后来在学校的语言表现的重要一步。本博士论文研究的重点是儿童对“暂时”模棱两可句子的理解，作为研究记忆和抑制等系统对语言学习和理解影响的窗口。和成年人一样，孩子们很早就开始理解他们实时听到的句子。然而，与成年人不同的是，如果句子后面出现了额外的、不相容的信息，他们似乎很难修改这些解释。这种困难被认为是由于记忆和/或不成熟的抑制控制的限制而产生的。在本项目中，研究人员建立了儿童句子加工的两个计算模型，一个是记忆限制，一个是抑制限制，以检验这些建议，并探讨这些认知系统与发展语言知识的相互作用。通过建立这些模型，本研究更全面地了解了记忆和抑制对儿童语言发展和理解的影响。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。

Without explicit instruction, children learn language at a spectacular rate: by 5-6 years old, most children are able to speak and understand language quite well. As children learn their language(s), other cognitive systems, like memory and inhibition, are developing as well. Because language development relies on these additional cognitive systems, difficulties that stem from these developing systems may influence children’s ability to learn language. This project uses computational tools to model the real-time process of sentence understanding to provide insights into how developing memory and inhibition may influence language understanding in children. This project serves as an important step toward understanding how developing cognitive systems can impact children’s language learning, as well as how differences in these systems can influence children’s later language performance in school.This doctoral dissertation research focuses on children’s understanding of “temporarily” ambiguous sentences as a window into the effect of systems like memory and inhibition on language learning and understanding. Like adults, children commit early to interpretations of sentences that they are hearing in real-time. Unlike adults, however, they appear to have difficulty revising those interpretations if additional, incompatible information arrives later in the sentence. This difficulty has been proposed to arise due to constraints on memory and/or immature inhibitory control. In this project, the researchers develop two computational models of children’s sentence processing, one of memory limitations and one of inhibitory limitations, to test these proposals and probe the interaction of these cognitive systems with developing linguistic knowledge. By developing these models, this research provides a fuller understanding of the influence of memory and inhibition on language development and comprehension in children.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.