LINKING EARLY LINGUISTIC AND CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

这项建议涉及早期概念发展的基本问题， 语言的发展，以及它们之间的联系。 孩子们，就像 成年人面临着一个非常丰富的环境。 每天，他们 遇到新的事物，见证新的事件。 这种多样性将是 如果每一个物体和事件都被视为独特的，那就太令人震惊了。 因此，我们认为， 幼儿期的一项基本任务是形成类别， 对象之间的共性，并学习这些类别的单词。 发展研究表明，婴儿和幼儿欣赏 很多种类的分类。 他们的认知成就与 在语言习得方面也同样令人印象深刻。 可能性不大 它们在概念和语言上的进步是完全独立的。 的确， 最近的发展工作揭示了特定类型的词（例如， 名词、形容词）突出特定类型的概念关系 (e.g.,对象的类别、对象的属性）。 然而， 现有工作的两个严重局限性。 首先，因为大多数 现有的文献主要致力于学龄前儿童谁拥有 已经取得了重大的语言进步，我们有一个非常有限的 了解他们如何开始建立这些重要的联系， 发展 因此，拟议的研究将仔细绘制 这些联系的出现，在前语言的婴儿和幼儿， 考察语言对他们分类能力的影响。 第二，因为现有的研究完全基于 说英语的科目，目前还不清楚他们是否普遍， 人类发展 拟议的研究将审查这些联系， 学习英语以外语言的儿童。 他们将建立在 我的初步与其他2印欧语言（法语，西班牙语）和 将调查范围扩大到包括ASL，这是一种非印欧语言， 不同于以前研究的语言在句法，形态， 传播方式。 预测是，一些联系（例如，的 名词和范畴关系之间的关系）甚至会在孩子 取得了许多语言学上的进步，在人类语言中将是显而易见的， 最初会过度扩展到包括来自其他语言形式的单词 类（例如，形容词）。 相反，其他链接（例如，之间 形容词和对象属性）可能出现后，可能依赖于一个 语言和概念知识的现有基础，并可能有所不同 根据所习得语言的具体情况而定。 通过组合 发展和跨语言的方法，这项研究将1） 大大拓宽了现有的经验和理论基础， （2）提供一个窗口，通过它可以更清楚地看到 早期语言学和语言学之间这些强大而精确的联系的起源， 概念发展，3）丰富我们对早期语言的理解 和认知发展。

This proposal addresses fundamental issues of early conceptual development, language development, and the linkages between them. Children, like adults, are faced with an enormously rich environment. Each day, they encounter new objects and witness new events. This diversity would be overwhelming if each object and event were treated as unique. Therefore, an essential task of early childhood is to form categories that capture commonalities among objects and to learn words for these categories. Developmental research has documented that infants and toddlers appreciate many kinds of categories. Their cognitive achievements are concurrent with equally impressive gains in language acquisition. It is unlikely that their conceptual and linguistic advances are entirely independent. Indeed, recent developmental work reveals that particular types of words (e.g., nouns, adjectives) highlight particular types of conceptual relations (e.g., categories of objects, properties of objects). There are, however, two serious limitations in the existing work. First, because most of the existing literature is devoted primarily to preschool children who have already made significant linguistic advances, we have a very limited understanding of how they begin to build these important linkages early in development. Therefore, the proposed studies will chart carefully the emergence of these links in prelinguistic infants and in toddlers by examining the influence of language on their categorization abilities. Second, because the existing research has been based exclusively on English-speaking subjects, it is unclear whether they are universal to human development. The proposed studies will examine these linkages in young children learning languages other than English. They will build upon my preliminary with 2 other Indo-European languages (French , Spanish) and extend the investigation to include ASL, a non-Indo-European language that differs from the languages previously studied in syntax, morphology, and modality of transmission. The prediction is that some linkages (e.g., that between nouns and category relations) will emerge even before the child has made many linguistic advances, will be evident across human languages, and will initially be overextended to include words from other linguistic form classes (e.g., adjectives). In contrast, other links (e.g., that between adjectives and object properties) may emerge later, may rely upon an existing base of linguistic and conceptual knowledge, and may vary according to the specifics of the language being acquired. By combining developmental and cross-linguistic approaches, this research will 1) broaden considerably the empirical and theoretical foundations of existing research, 2) provide a window through which to view more clearly the origins of these powerful and precise linkages between early linguistic and conceptual development, and 3) enrich our understanding of early language and cognitive development.