How does language experience support language development? Short-term priming and long-term learning.

语言经验如何支持语言发展？

• 批准号: ES/R007721/1
• 负责人: Katherine Messenger
• 金额: $ 59.13万
• 依托单位: University of Warwick
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2018 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FR007721%2F1
• 关键词: How; does; language; experience; support

How we learn and use language is, not surprisingly, related to the language we experience around us: ultimately children who are exposed to English learn English, but more specifically, research shows that children exposed to varied language input (wider vocabularies, diverse sentences) come to develop more extensive language skills than those with narrower input. While we know that children's experience with language is important for shaping their learning of language, it remains unclear precisely how our experience with language influences our language development: what aspects of language experience are important, and how do children make use of them? Our project investigates how children learn from their language experiences, and the underlying learning mechanisms that they use to do so. Understanding the mechanisms that support language learning is theoretically important, because it informs our understanding of a uniquely human ability. But it also has substantial societal implications, because successful language development is critical to later educational and social attainment.Our project focuses on how language experience affects children's use of particular grammatical or "syntactic" structures - the way words are ordered in a sentence. We know that one way in which both children and adults make use of the language they experience is by re-using it. This re-use occurs not just for specific words (e.g., saying 'sofa' instead of 'settee' because that's what your friend just called it), but also at more abstract levels, including grammar. For instance, you are more likely to say "those pictures were drawn by Quentin Blake" after hearing someone say "this book was written by Roald Dahl". This grammatical repetition is known as "syntactic priming": hearing a word order makes it easier for you to re-use that order, even with different words. When a speaker repeats a structure they have been exposed to, it indicates that they have a mental representation for that structure that they can use when understanding a sentence, and then re-use when planning a new sentence to say. So patterns of syntactic priming effects in children provide evidence about which grammatical structures they know.More recent research suggests that the influence of such priming lasts longer than the immediate context. In fact, recent models of language processing propose that priming can lead to long-term learning, so that when someone experiences a grammatical structure, it sets in train a persistent change in their language representations. For example, when a child hears "this book was written by Roald Dahl", it does not just help them to re-use that structure immediately, it also strengthens their knowledge of that structure. But it is unclear how this learning occurs: how does children's immediate experience with language translate into longer-term development of adult-like representations? In this research we will conduct psycholinguistic experiments with children at different stages of language development in which we vary which types of structure children hear and say, in different contexts and at different time points. We will examine how likely they are to re-use these structures and how long-lasting such effects are, in order to cast light on the way in which children can learn from different elements of the language they experience. We will address the following questions: When in language development is this type of experience important? To what extent is experience-based learning linked to specific contexts, whether linguistic (experience of particular words) or non-linguistic (experience within a particular conversation or task), and to what extent does it generalise? Does learning occur to the same extent through the act of hearing different word orders and the act of saying them? Answering these questions will ultimately help us understand the mechanisms, conditions and trajectories underlying successful language development.

我们学习和使用语言的方式，毫不奇怪，与我们周围的语言体验有关：最终，接触英语的孩子学会了英语，但更具体地说，研究表明，接触不同语言输入（更广泛的词汇，不同的句子）的孩子比那些输入较少的孩子发展出更广泛的语言技能。虽然我们知道儿童的语言经验对塑造他们的语言学习很重要，但我们仍然不清楚我们的语言经验是如何影响我们的语言发展的：语言经验的哪些方面是重要的，儿童如何利用它们？我们的项目调查儿童如何从他们的语言经验中学习，以及他们使用的潜在学习机制。理解支持语言学习的机制在理论上是很重要的，因为它告诉我们对人类独特能力的理解。但它也有重大的社会影响，因为成功的语言发展对以后的教育和社会成就至关重要。我们的项目关注语言经验如何影响儿童使用特定的语法或“句法”结构——句子中单词排列的方式。我们知道，儿童和成人利用他们所经历的语言的一种方式是重复使用它。这种重复使用不仅发生在特定的单词上（例如，说“sofa”而不是“settee”，因为你的朋友刚刚这么叫它），而且还发生在更抽象的层面，包括语法。例如，当你听到有人说“这本书是罗尔德·达尔写的”时，你更有可能说“这些画是昆汀·布莱克画的”。这种语法重复被称为“句法启动”：听到一个单词的顺序会让你更容易重复使用这个顺序，即使是不同的单词。当说话者重复他们所接触到的结构时，这表明他们在理解一个句子时可以使用该结构的心理表征，然后在计划说一个新句子时重复使用。所以儿童的句法启动效应模式提供了他们知道哪些语法结构的证据。最近的研究表明，这种启动的影响比直接的环境持续的时间更长。事实上，最近的语言处理模型提出，启动可以导致长期学习，所以当一个人经历一个语法结构时，它会使他们的语言表征发生持续的变化。例如，当一个孩子听到“这本书是罗尔德·达尔写的”，这不仅能帮助他们立即重新使用这个结构，还能加强他们对这个结构的认识。但目前尚不清楚这种学习是如何发生的：儿童对语言的直接体验是如何转化为成人表征的长期发展的？在这项研究中，我们将对处于不同语言发展阶段的儿童进行心理语言学实验，在不同的环境和不同的时间点，我们会改变儿童听到和说的结构类型。我们将研究他们重复使用这些结构的可能性有多大，以及这种影响会持续多久，以便了解儿童如何从他们所经历的语言的不同元素中学习。我们将讨论以下问题：在语言发展中，这种类型的经验什么时候重要？基于经验的学习在多大程度上与特定情境相关联，无论是语言（特定单词的经验）还是非语言（特定对话或任务中的经验），以及它在多大程度上是泛化的？通过听不同词序的行为和说出来的行为，学习是否达到了同样的程度？回答这些问题将最终帮助我们理解成功语言发展的机制、条件和轨迹。

项目成果

Syntactic Priming in Language Acquisition - Representations, mechanisms and applications

语言习得中的句法启动——表征、机制和应用

• DOI: 10.1075/tilar.31.04mes
• 发表时间: 2022
• 作者: Messenger K

The effect of input modality on children's experience-based language learning: an online syntactic priming study

输入方式对儿童基于经验的语言学习的影响：一项在线句法启动研究

• 发表时间: 2021
• 作者: Buckle, L.

Syntactic priming in language development: Representations, mechanisms, and applications

语言发展中的句法启动：表征、机制和应用

• 作者: Messenger, K.