CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF NOMINAL CATEGORY FORMATION

2 - 3岁的孩子是聪明的名词学习者。 事实上，他们是如此熟练，以至于他们经常只需要听到一个被命名的对象，就可以正确地将该名称推广到该类别的其他成员。 幼儿在将名词映射到类别方面的能力特别显著，因为名词在许多不同种类的类别中命名物体，物质的类别，人，动物，人工制品。 本研究验证了儿童通过学习单词来学习单词的假设。 这个想法是，每个单词学习使儿童更聪明，更快的单词学习者。 本项目验证了四个假设：1.早期习得的名词呈现出各种统计学意义，可以教授不同种类的组织原则。 我们将研究大约300个名词的语料库的统计特性，这些名词是儿童学习的第一个名词的典型。 2.早期名词范畴的统计特征足以创造关于种类的知识。我们将把名词语料库教给一个联想学习设备，一个连接网络。 3.一个孩子所知道的具体名词决定了他如何解释和概括一个新遇到的名词。 我们将在人工单词学习任务中测量20至36个月大的儿童已知的单个名词以及他们对新名词的概括。 我们将提出连接网络的名词，个别儿童知道，并试图模拟个别儿童的表现在人工单词学习任务。 4.学习不同语言的儿童表现出不同的发展轨迹。 我们将用两种语言-英语和日语来测试假设1到3。 过去的研究表明，英语和日语儿童在解释和概括新奇事物的新奇名称方面存在差异。 这项研究测试的想法，这是因为儿童的新名词概括反映了统计特性的名词，他们已经学会了。 孩子们成为他们正在学习的特定语言的聪明学习者。

Two- and 3- year old children are smart noun learners. Indeed, they are so skilled that they often need to hear only a single object named to correctly generalize that name to other members of the category. Young children's facility in mapping nouns to categories is particularly remarkable because nouns name objects in many different kinds of categories, categories of substances, people, animals, artifacts. This research tests the hypothesis that children learn how to learn words by learning words. The idea is that each word learned makes children ever smarter and ever faster word learners. The project tests four hpotheses: 1. Early learned nouns present the kinds of statistical regularities that could teach the organizational principles of different kinds. We will study the statistical properties of a corpus of about 300 nouns that are typical of the first nouns that children learn. 2. The statistical regularities characteristic of early noun categories are sufficient to create knowledge about kinds. We will teach the corpus of nouns to an associative learning device, a connectionist net. 3. The specific nouns known by an individual child determine how that child interprets and generalizes a newly encountered noun. We will measure the individual nouns known by children 20 to 36 months of age and their generalization of novel nouns in an artificial word learning task. We will present the connectionist network with the nouns that individual children know and attempt to model individual children's performances in artificial word learning tasks. 4. Children learning different languages exhibit different developmental trajectories. We will test hypotheses 1 through 3 in two languages - English and Japanese. Past research indicates that English- and Japanese-speaking children differ in their interpretation and generalization of novel names for novel objects. This research tests the idea that this is because children's novel noun generalizations reflect the statistical properties of the nouns that they have already learned. Children become smart learners of the specific language they are learning.