Charting lexical development through dense coding and analysis of word senses

通过密集编码和词义分析来绘制词汇发展图

• 批准号: ES/V012878/1
• 负责人: Hugh Rabagliati
• 金额: $ 30.73万
• 依托单位: University of Edinburgh
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FV012878%2F1
• 关键词: Charting; lexical; development; through; dense

Children learn words at a remarkable rate, which is all the more striking because most words are highly ambiguous. Specifically, most words are "polysemous", which means that they can be used in a range of distinct but related senses. For instance, think of all the different ways that the word "run" can be used: You can run a race, run a car, run a company, run some tests, or even run a bath. These flexible uses of words provide us with a vivid expressive power -- we can use a word with one meaning while alluding to all the rest -- but most researchers have tended to assume that polysemy also makes words hard to learn. In particular, when a word's meaning changes across uses, then how are children ever supposed to acquire it?We have argued that this assumption is backwards, and that flexible uses of words actually help children to acquire a vocabulary. That is because the senses of words are related to one another (e.g., there is an obvious link between the senses of run in "run a car" versus "run a company"), and so once a child has learned one sense of a word, then they can use that knowledge as a supportive platform to more easily infer new senses. By contrast, if all words were unambiguous, or all words had unrelated ambiguous meanings, then each new meaning would have to be learned without any support. Thus, while polysemy may seem confusing from the outside, it is actually an opportunity for learning, when seen from the perspective of a child. This project tests three implications of this idea. First, for polysemy to help learning, then we expect that it should be plentiful in the input that children receive. However, we do not know how much polysemy children hear. Indeed, it is possible that caregivers implicitly avoid polysemy, particularly with younger children, if they tend to say simple and unambiguous words. Second, if polysemy indeed helps learning, then we should expect that children also use polysemy, even in the first words that they say. Finally, if polysemy helps learning, then we should expect that it will be easier for children to learn new senses for words, than to learn entirely new words.To test these implications, we need a database of how caregivers and children use polysemous words, that specifies which senses are used when. However, while there are existing databases of how caregivers and children interact, they never specify the different senses in which words are used. For instance, when "run" is used, the corpora never explicitly specify with which meaning. Hence, quantitative analyses of polysemy are currently impossible.Thus, the first aim of this research is to recode these databases of child language in terms of word senses. To do this, we will use a new toolkit that our group has developed, and we will apply it to both English and French data. The output will be (to our knowledge) the largest sense-annotated database yet constructed, not only in terms of child language, but in terms of human conversations more broadly. Using this database, we will then examine how caregivers use polysemy when talking to their children, and how children use polysemy in their earliest language use. We will build novel statistical models that assess questions such as whether parents avoid using polysemy when talking to their youngest children, and whether children find it easier to either use new senses for old words, or learn entirely new words altogether.These data and analyses should provide the clearest picture to date of how children acquire polysemy, with implications for theories of language development, theories from linguistics, and for our understanding of how caregivers interact with their children. We will make our tools and databases publicly available, and describe our results in scholarly journals.

孩子们以惊人的速度学习单词，这一点更令人震惊，因为大多数单词都是高度模糊的。具体来说，大多数单词都是“多义”的，这意味着它们可以在一系列不同但相关的意义上使用。例如，想想“run”这个词的各种不同用法：你可以参加比赛，开一辆车，经营一家公司，做一些测试，甚至洗个澡。词语的这些灵活用法为我们提供了生动的表达能力--我们可以用一个词的一个意思来暗示所有其他的意思--但是大多数研究人员倾向于假设一词多义也使词语难以学习。特别是，当一个词的意义在不同的用途中发生变化时，那么孩子们应该如何获得它呢？我们认为，这种假设是倒退的，灵活使用单词实际上有助于儿童获得词汇。这是因为词语的意义是相互关联的（例如，在“run a car”和“run a company”中，run的意义之间有明显的联系），因此，一旦孩子学会了一个单词的一个意义，那么他们就可以将该知识作为一个支持平台，更容易地推断出新的意义。相比之下，如果所有的单词都是明确的，或者所有的单词都有不相关的模糊含义，那么每个新的含义都必须在没有任何支持的情况下学习。因此，虽然一词多义从外部看起来可能令人困惑，但从儿童的角度来看，它实际上是一个学习的机会。这个项目测试了这个想法的三个含义。首先，对于帮助学习的一词多义，那么我们希望它应该是丰富的输入，儿童接收。然而，我们不知道孩子们听到了多少多义词。事实上，如果照顾者倾向于说简单而明确的话，他们可能会含蓄地避免一词多义，特别是对年幼的孩子。第二，如果一词多义确实有助于学习，那么我们应该期待孩子们也使用一词多义，甚至在他们说的第一个词。最后，如果一词多义有助于学习，那么我们应该预料到，孩子们学习单词的新含义比学习全新的单词更容易。为了测试这些含义，我们需要一个数据库，记录照顾者和孩子们如何使用一词多义词，并指定何时使用哪些含义。然而，虽然现有的数据库中有照顾者和儿童如何互动，但它们从未指定使用单词的不同含义。例如，当使用“run”时，语料库从未明确指定其含义。因此，本研究的第一个目的是对这些儿童语言数据库进行词义重新编码。为此，我们将使用我们小组开发的一个新工具包，并将其应用于英文和法文数据。据我们所知，它的输出将是迄今为止最大的语义注释数据库，不仅是在儿童语言方面，而且在更广泛的人类对话方面。使用这个数据库，我们将研究如何照顾者使用一词多义时，与他们的孩子，以及儿童如何使用一词多义在他们最早的语言使用。我们将建立新的统计模型来评估一些问题，比如父母在和最小的孩子说话时是否会避免使用一词多义，孩子是否会更容易使用旧单词的新含义，或者完全学习新单词。这些数据和分析应该提供迄今为止最清晰的关于孩子如何获得一词多义的图片，并对语言发展理论，语言学理论，以及我们对看护者如何与孩子互动的理解。我们将公开我们的工具和数据库，并在学术期刊上描述我们的结果。

项目成果

Learning dimensions of meaning: Children's acquisition of but.

意义的学习维度：儿童对“但是”的习得。

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2023.101597
• 发表时间: 2023
• 期刊: Cognitive psychology
• 影响因子: 2.6
• 作者: Skarabela B