USE OF SYNTAX IN VERB ACQUISITION

这项研究的长期目标是发现词语的含义是如何 也就是说，孩子是如何映射 语言的意义。 这一目标将通过考虑 孩子在学习单词时面临两个问题：归纳和 合并问题。 归纳问题存在于 名词和形容词以及动词，并反映了一个事实，即世界 孩子们从中发现的词义是丰富而复杂的， 因此，仅凭观察似乎不足以确定 一句话 合并问题只存在于动词中，并源于 事实上，动词意义成分的组合模式， 或合并为动词的情况在不同语言中有所不同。 拟议 研究将详细研究动词的另一个信息来源， 学习;即，动词出现的句法结构。 广泛的研究揭示了句法和语法之间的许多矛盾， 动词语义学;这些研究将探讨是否以及在多大程度上 孩子们可以用这些单词来学习新的动词--这个过程被称为 语法引导。 需要解决的主要问题包括： 句法在词汇中的作用有多深？ 的事实 许多动词可以出现在不同的句法结构中， 成人语言暗示了另一个问题：做多个演示（a 一种结构，每种结构出现一次，而不是一种结构 （多次提出）帮助动词学习？ 最后，如何以及何时 是语法和动词语义之间的纽带， 语法引导的过程，学会了吗 大多数这些 问题将使用一种新的语言理解方法进行研究， 使我们能够详细地研究 只有12个月大的孩子。

The long-term goal of the research is to discover how the meanings of words are learned by young children; that is, how the child maps the sounds of language onto their meanings. This goal will be addressed by considering two problems the child faces in learning words: the induction and conflation problems. The induction problem exists for the acquisition of nouns and adjectives as well as verbs, and reflects the fact that the world from which the child discovers word meanings is rich and complex; so much so, that observation alone seems insufficient to determine the referent of a word. The conflation problem exists only for verbs, and derives from the fact that the patter of components of verb meaning that are incorporated, or conflated, into the actual verb differs across languages. The proposed studies will examine in detail another source of information for verb learning; namely, the syntactic structures in which verbs appear. Extensive investigations have revealed many regularities between syntax and verb semantics; these studies will explore whether and to what extent children can use these regularities to learn new verbs--a process termed Syntactic Bootstrapping. The primary questions to be addressed include: How deeply within the lexicon can syntax aid verb acquisition? The fact that many verbs can appear in several different syntactic structures in the adult language suggests another question: Do multiple presentations (a variety of structures each presented once as opposed to one structure presented several times) aid in verb learning? And finally, how and when are the regularities between syntax and verb semantics, which feed the process of syntactic bootstrapping, learned? The majority of these questions will be studied using a new language comprehension method, which allows us to investigate in some detail the linguistic knowledge of children as young as twelve months of age.