LANGUAGE LEARNABILITY AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

语言学习和语言发展

• 批准号: 2888887
• 负责人: STEVEN PINKER
• 金额: $ 18.26万
• 依托单位: MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1983
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1983-09-01 至 2000-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2888887
• 关键词: Alzheimer's disease; Parkinson's disease; Williams syndrome; behavioral /social science research tag; child (0-11); child behavior; child psychology; human subject; language development; language disorders; learning; memory; mental process; preschool child (1-5); speech; verbal learning

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.

该项目试图了解儿童的语言发展， 使用规则（walk-walked）和不规则（come-came）的屈折变化作为 一个易于处理的、经过深入研究的模型系统。 两种音调变化 被认为是两种心理计算的例子 在语言上。不规则的单词储存在心理词典中， 联想记忆偶尔会将模式归纳为新词 根据它们与以前学过的单词的相似性。常规形式是 由心理语法中的符号规则处理产生， 操纵抽象符号（例如，'past = verb + ed'）。两个经验 方法被使用。第一，对儿童的心理进行深入分析。 转录的自发语音-侧重于错误，如brake，brang， 他走路和他们正确的对应物。误差是重要的数据 因为它们是创造性语言处理的例子， 孩子的头脑，研究将定量记录何时，如何 经常，以及为什么孩子们会这样做。第二种方法使用实验室 实验中，孩子们用不同的语言产生或判断新的动词， 特性.这些研究试图表明， 一个词的声音时，计算如何屈折它，以及如何创建规则， 和存储在记忆中的形式相互作用。实验室方法也将 应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，阿尔茨海默氏症， 帕金森氏病和威廉姆斯综合征，因为这些方法 非常适合于梳理他们在记忆和规则方面的障碍， 处理.最终目标是建立一个广泛的定量数据库， 儿童习得单一规则，可作为有据可查的 在语言发展的实证研究中， 假设有心理实现的语言规则，和一个 一套基准，根据这些基准， 进行评估。