Cross-linguistic study of nominal category formation

描述（由申请人提供）：人类分类分为不同的种类，例如生物和非生物，有生命的和无生命的，物体和物质。这些差异在人们对不同种类的推理方式和他们对类别的神经组织中都很明显。本研究探讨了这些差异的发展起源。这些研究验证了范畴组织为不同种类是事物感知特性、词汇范畴结构和语言之间相互关系的学习结果的假设。为了验证这一假设，该研究提出了11项研究，调查儿童学习的前300个名词所呈现的统计规律。范畴结构的规律，以及它们与知觉线索、事件和与它们共现的动词的关系，将在英语和日语两种语言中进行研究。通过比较两种语言呈现的结构，我们可以梳理出语言和感知相关性的相关贡献。我们用神经网络对这些规律将类别组织成种类的过程进行建模。从这些神经网络模拟中，我们得出预测，然后在行为研究中对学习英语的儿童和学习日语作为唯一语言的儿童进行测试。这些孩子的年龄从18个月到4岁不等。这项研究有助于我们理解语言在认知发展中的作用，从而对语言迟缓、环境迟缓和其他语言学习受到某种损害的领域的儿童健康产生直接影响。此外，该研究还寻求对所涉及的学习机制进行细致的说明，这些机制在语言在早期认知发展中的作用之外具有普遍意义。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Human categories are organized into different kinds, for example, living and nonliving things, animates and inanimates, objects and substances. These differences are evident in how people reason about different kinds and in their neural organization of categories. This research investigates the developmental origins of these distinctions. The studies test the hypothesis that the organization of categories into different kinds is the learned consequence of correlations among the perceptual properties of things, lexical category structure, and language. To test this hypothesis the research proposes 11 studies investigating the statistical regularities presented by the first 300 nouns that children learn. The regularities in category structure, their relation to perceptual cues, to events, and to the verbs with they co-occur will be studied in two languages -- English and Japanese. By comparing the structures presented by two languages we can tease apart the relevant contributions of language and perceptual correlations. We model the processes through which these regularities may organize categories into kinds with neural networks. From these neural network simulations, we derive predictions that are then tested in behavioral studies with children learning English and children learning Japanese as their only language. The children range in age from 18 months to 4 years old. This research contributes to our understanding of the role of language in cognitive development and in so doing has direct implications for child health in the areas of language delay, environmental retardation, and other areas in which language learning is in some way compromised. In addition, the research seeks a fine grained specification of the learning mechanisms involved which have general significance beyond the role of language in early cognitive development.