LANGUAGE LEARNABILITY AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

该项目试图了解儿童的语言发展， 使用规则(走-走)和不规则(来-来)的屈折变化作为 易于管理、深入研究的模型系统。两种曲折变化 被认为是使用两种心理计算的例子 在语言上。不规则的单词存储在心理词典中，一个 偶尔将模式概括为新单词的联想记忆 根据它们与以前学过的单词的相似性。常规表格是 由心理语法中的象征性规则处理产生，这 操纵抽象符号(例如，‘过去=动词+ed’)。两个经验 本文采用的是研究方法。第一是对儿童的深入分析 转录的自发演讲-关注错误，如ComEd、Brang和 他走起路来，和他们正确的对手。误差是重要的数据 因为它们是创造性语言处理的例子 儿童的大脑，这些研究将量化地记录何时、如何 经常，以及为什么孩子们会这样做。第二种方法是用实验室 儿童用不同的词产生或判断新动词的实验 属性。这些研究试图表明儿童是否敏感 在计算一个单词的发音如何变化以及如何创建规则时 和存储在内存中的表单进行交互。实验室方法也将是 适用于某些老年人和发育障碍人群， 包括那些有特殊语言障碍的人，阿尔茨海默病， 帕金森氏症和威廉姆斯综合症，因为这些方法是 非常适合梳理他们在记忆和规则方面的障碍- 正在处理。最终目标是建立一个广泛的量化数据库 儿童习得的单一规则，将被用作有充分记录的 实证研究中的测试案例--语言发展，测试 假设存在心理上执行的语言规则，以及 一组基准，残障人群的语言可以作为参照 被评估。

The project attempts to understand language development in children, using regular (walk-walked) and irregular (come-came) inflection as a tractable, intensively-studied model system. The two kinds of inflection are thought to be examples of the two kinds of mental computation used in language. Irregular words are stored in the mental lexicon, an associative memory which occasionally generalizes patterns To new words based on their similarity to previously-learned words. Regular forms are created by symbolic rule-processing in the mental grammar, which manipulates abstract symbols (e.g., 'past = verb + ed'). Two empirical methods are used. The first is intensive analysis Of children's transcribed spontaneous speech-focusing on errors like comed, brang, and he walk and their correct counterparts. The errors are important data because they are examples of creative linguistic processing in the child's mind, and the studies will quantitatively document when, how often, and why children make them. The second method uses laboratory experiments where children produce or judge novel verbs with different properties. The studies attempt to show whether children are sensitive to a word's sound when computing how to inflect it, and how rule-created and memory-stored forms interact. The laboratory methods will also be applied to certain aged and developmentally impaired populations, including those with Specific Language Impairment, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, and Williams Syndrome, because the methods are ideally suited to teasing apart their impairments in memory versus rule- processing. The ultimate goals are an extensive quantitative database on children's acquisition of a single rule, to be used as a well-documented test case in the empirical study-of language development, a test of the hypothesis that there are mentally-implemented linguistic rules, and a set of benchmarks against which the language of impaired populations can be assessed.