FOR 2253: Crossing the Borders: The Interplay of Language, Cognition, and the Brain in Early Human Development

FOR 2253：跨越边界：语言、认知和大脑在人类早期发展中的相互作用

• 批准号: 258522519
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Max-Planck-Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Units
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2014-12-31 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/258522519?language=en
• 关键词: 2253; Crossing; Borders; Interplay; Language

During the first years of life, children develop important abilities and acquire essential knowledge in several domains, like language, cognition, and social cognition. These competencies have a fundamental impact on lifelong cognitive outcomes, and their development seems to be at least partially tied to sensitive periods in early childhood (e.g., Knudsen, 2004; Kuhl, 2011).The last decades of developmental science are characterized by a fast growing body of research using a large spectrum of experimental methods and providing fascinating insights into the early developmental trajectories of human beings. However, research on early development is typically performed in separate scientific disciplines. The planned Research Unit aims at integrating experts from psychology, linguistics, and developmental neuroscience to establish a systematic interdisciplinary research program to study the interplay of language, cognition, and socio-cognitive abilities in early development. The first aim of the Research Unit is to investigate the fundamentals of prominent developmental changes that occur in children¿s behavior during the first years of life. One example for such a change is the transition from being a universal perceiver to becoming an experience-driven perceiver. Another example is the transition of the infant as a highly efficient statistical learner to a learner who is more restricted in these learning capacities. The second aim of the Research Unit is to study the underlying mechanisms of striking parallels that occur in the developmental course of language and cognition. Examples are infants¿ ability to segment continuous streams of events into single units, understand the causal relations in events, or process adjacent and non-adjacent structures in both heard language and observed actions. These processes and their development are mostly studied separately in linguistics or cognitive psychology. By taking an interdisciplinary perspective, more of such parallels may be identified, and the driving developmental factors can be investigated in terms of domain-general or domain-specific processes and their underlying neural mechanism. The Research Unit provides an integrated look at early human development by studying the interaction of the growing competencies in nonlinguistic, linguistic, and social-cognitive domains, the maturation of the neuro-cognitive system, and the role of general cognitive functions.

在生命的最初几年，孩子们在几个领域发展了重要的能力，并获得了基本的知识，如语言、认知和社会认知。这些能力对终身的认知结果有着根本性的影响，它们的发展似乎至少部分与儿童早期的敏感时期有关（例如，Knudsen, 2004; Kuhl, 2011）。发展科学的最后几十年的特点是一个快速增长的研究机构使用大量的实验方法，并提供迷人的见解对人类的早期发展轨迹。然而，关于早期发育的研究通常是在独立的科学学科中进行的。计划中的研究单位旨在整合心理学、语言学和发展神经科学的专家，建立一个系统的跨学科研究项目，研究语言、认知和社会认知能力在早期发展中的相互作用。研究单位的首要目标是调查儿童在生命最初几年的行为中发生的显著发展变化的基本原理。这种变化的一个例子是从一个普遍的感知者转变为一个经验驱动的感知者。另一个例子是婴儿从一个高效的统计学习者过渡到一个在这些学习能力上更受限制的学习者。研究单位的第二个目标是研究语言和认知发展过程中惊人的相似之处的潜在机制。例如，婴儿能够将连续的事件流分割成单个单元，理解事件中的因果关系，或者在听到的语言和观察到的动作中处理相邻和非相邻结构。这些过程及其发展在语言学或认知心理学中大多是单独研究的。通过跨学科的视角，可以发现更多类似的相似之处，并且可以根据领域一般或领域特定过程及其潜在的神经机制来研究驱动发展的因素。该研究单元通过研究非语言、语言和社会认知领域不断增长的能力、神经认知系统的成熟和一般认知功能的作用之间的相互作用，为早期人类发展提供了一个综合的视角。