Prosody and function words in early syntax acquisition

描述（由候选人提供）：概括地说，拟议的研究将解决婴儿如何开始采取一个线性字符串的话流，并建立一个分层结构的句法表示。这个问题对于人类语言发展的解释和自然语言处理软件的设计都很重要。这两种努力都是语言缺陷领域的人感兴趣的，无论是发展性的还是创伤性的。具体而言，该项目将研究虚词和韵律信息在婴儿句法早期发展中的各自作用。本研究的重点是虚词在语言习得其他领域的使用、韵律和虚词在婴儿句子表征中的相互作用以及功能句法范畴的发展。该方法将整合行为和计算方法。婴儿知觉注意力的两种测量方法，头转向偏好程序和多通道偏好注视范式，将被用来评估婴儿对特定线索（韵律和功能词的位置）的敏感性，以在各种情况下的句法。这一行为工作将辅以连接主义模型，以比较语音输入的不同方面在发展句法知识方面的相对好处。

DESCRIPTION (provided by candidate): Broadly, the proposed research will address how infants begin to take a linear string of words in the speech stream and build a hierarchically structured syntactic representation. This question is of importance for accounts of human language development and in the design of software for natural language processing. Both of these endeavors are of interest to those in the area of language deficits, either developmental or traumatic. Specifically, the project will examine the respective roles of function words and prosodic information in the early development of syntax in infants. The investigation will focus on the use of function words in other domains of language acquisition, the interaction between prosody and function words in infants' representation of sentences, and the development of functional syntactic categories. The approach will integrate behavioral and computational methods. Two measures of infant perceptual attention, the Headturn Preference Procedure, and the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm will be used to assess infants' sensitivity to specific cues (prosody and the location of function words) to syntax in various contexts. This behavioral work will be supplemented with connectionist models to compare the relative benefits of different aspects of the speech input in developing syntactic knowledge.