ON-LINE USE OF VERB MEANINGS IN CHILDREN

要成为成年的语言理解者，儿童必须培养对单词含义的快速理解。成人句子处理的核心是所谓的动词语义限制。句子的主语必须能够完成动词所表示的动作，而直接宾语必须是那种可以被感知、操纵或以相关方式改变的事物。由于以前的方法要求理解者阅读，所以对于儿童何时能够迅速掌握这些限制，我们一无所知。这种能力的发展现在可以用新开发的头戴式眼动追踪器来研究，它可以从视觉注视的时间过程和顺序中产生丰富的干扰。这项被提议的工作将利用这样一个事实，即许多动词对其直接对象的可视性施加了限制——这些行为是由它们的物理性质造成的。例如，给定“打开盒子”的命令，能够快速访问语义限制的听者应该在听到动词后不久开始搜索合适的对象（即具有不可密封内部卷的对象），没有这种访问权限的听者应该在听到直接对象后才开始搜索。通过研究不同年龄的孩子在这项任务中的表现，我们将了解到很多关于学习者何时成熟为快速、有效的语言理解者的信息。

To become adult comprehenders of language, children must develop rapid access to the meanings of words. Central to adult sentence processing are the so-called semantic restrictions of verbs. The subject of a sentence must be capable performing the action denoted by the verb, while the direct object must be the sort of thing that can be sensed, manipulated, or changed in the relevant way. Because previous methods have required comprehenders to read, nothing at all is yet known about when children develop rapid access to these restrictions. Development of this capacity can now be studied with the newly developed head- mounted eye-tracker, which allows rich interference to e made from the time-course and sequence of visual fixations. The proposed work will exploit the fact that many verbs place restrictions on the affordances of their direct objects-the actions made possible by their physical properties. Given the command to "Open the box," for instance, listeners who have rapid access to semantic restrictions should begin searching for an appropriate object (i.e., one with an unsealable interior volume) shortly after hearing the verb, listeners who do not have such access should begin searching only after hearing the direct object. Through studying how children of different ages perform in this task, a great deal will be learned about when learners approach maturity as rapid, efficient comprehenders of language.