Mechanisms of Early Grammatical Learning in Infants

婴儿早期语法学习的机制

• 批准号: 6722874
• 负责人: TOBEN H MINTZ
• 金额: $ 18.28万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-04-01 至 2006-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6722874
• 关键词: behavior test; behavioral /social science research tag; child (0-11); clinical research; computer simulation; cues; human subject; infant human (0-1 year); language development; neural information processing; perception; phonology; syntax; verbal conditioning; verbal learning

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed studies have several closely related aims that revolve around the broader goal of determining the mechanisms by which infants and very young children start to classify the words in their language. Determining how words are classified is a crucial part of learning the structure of a language on any theory of language acquisition. The fundamental hypothesis investigated in this proposal is that young language learners perform a distributional analysis on their linguistic input, and classify words together which occur in the same kinds of distributional environments (e.g., following a, the and happy, and preceding sings, sleep, knows, etc.). Distributional information is present in every utterance a child hears, and could provide a rich source of information about the basic categories of the language. This proposal investigates these questions with three multi-experimental studies. Study 1 undertakes an analysis of the distributional environments that are most informative for noun and verb classification, and attempts to link these environments with children's own utterances. Study 2 investigates whether 12-13-month-old infants use distributional information to categorize words in two ways: Study 2.1 tests for distributional categorization mechanisms by using English sentences, and Study 2.2 further tests the parameters of these mechanisms using artificial languages. Finally, Study 3 explores 14-15 month old infants use of distributional patterns of inflections to classify words. Taken together, the results of these studies will greatly increase our understanding of the nature of infants' any young children's crucial, early, stages of grammatical representations, and how they acquired them. Thus, the debate about the role of distributional analyses in children's early category representations can shift from the domain of speculation to that of empirical investigation.

描述（由申请人提供）：拟定的研究有几项密切相关的 围绕确定机制这一更广泛目标的相关目标 婴儿和非常小的孩子开始对他们的单词进行分类， 语言确定单词如何分类是学习的关键部分 任何语言习得理论的语言结构。的 该提案中研究的基本假设是年轻语言 学习者对其语言输入进行分布分析， 将出现在同一种分布中的词分类在一起 环境（例如，继一，该和快乐，并在此之前唱歌，睡觉， 知道，等等）。儿童的每一句话中都有分布信息 听到，并可以提供有关基本信息的丰富来源， 语言的类别。 本文通过三个多实验对这些问题进行了研究。 问题研究研究1对分布环境进行了分析， 是最翔实的名词和动词分类，并试图连接 这些环境与孩子们自己的话语。研究2调查是否 12-13个月大的婴儿使用分布信息对单词进行分类， 两种方法：研究2.1测试分布式分类机制，使用 研究2.2进一步测试了这些参数 使用人工语言的机制。最后，研究3探索了14-15个月 大婴儿使用词形变化的分布模式来分类单词。 综合起来，这些研究的结果将大大提高我们的 了解婴儿的性质，任何幼儿的关键，早期， 语法表达的各个阶段，以及他们是如何获得它们的。因此 关于分布分析在儿童早期分类中的作用的争论 表征可以从推测领域转向经验领域 调查