Prosody and function words in early syntax acquisition

描述(由候选人提供)：广泛地说，这项拟议的研究将解决婴儿如何开始在语音流中获取线性单词串并建立分层结构的句法表示。这个问题对于人类语言发展的解释和自然语言处理软件的设计具有重要意义。这两项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。具体地说，该项目将研究虚词和韵律信息在婴儿早期句法发展中的各自作用。研究的重点是虚词在语言习得的其他领域中的使用，韵律和虚词在婴幼儿句子表征中的相互作用，以及功能句法类别的发展。该方法将把行为方法和计算方法结合起来。本研究采用两种婴幼儿知觉注意测量方法，即转身偏爱程序和情态偏向范式，考察婴幼儿在不同语境下对特定线索(韵律和虚词位置)对句法的敏感性。这项行为研究将补充连接主义模型，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.