Prosody and function words in early syntax acquisition

描述（由候选人提供）：总的来说，拟议的研究将解决婴儿如何开始从语音流中获取线性单词串并建立分层结构的句法表示。这个问题对于解释人类语言的发展和设计用于自然语言处理的软件是很重要的。这两种努力都是那些在语言缺陷领域感兴趣的，无论是发展性的还是创伤性的。具体而言，该项目将研究功能词和韵律信息在婴儿早期语法发展中的各自作用。本研究将聚焦于功能词在语言习得其他领域的使用，韵律和功能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。该方法将结合行为和计算方法。婴儿知觉注意的两种测量方法，头转向偏好程序和多模式优先观察范式将被用来评估婴儿在不同语境中对特定线索（韵律和虚词位置）和语法的敏感性。这一行为研究将辅以联结主义模型，以比较语音输入的不同方面在发展句法知识方面的相对优势。

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.