Early Grammar Productivity: Three Languages, Comprehension

早期语法生产力：三种语言、理解

• 批准号: 7096147
• 负责人: LETITIA R NAIGLES
• 金额: $ 13.7万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT STORRS
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-09-28 至 2009-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7096147
• 关键词: child psychology; clinical research; comprehension; early experience; human subject; intelligence tests; language development; preschool child (1-5); verbal learning

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project seeks to investigate two critical questions in child language acquisition: (1) WHEN do toddlers show evidence of grammatical productivity in comprehension? (2) HOW does this productivity emergence vary, both cross-linguistically (i.e., do children learning some languages demonstrate earlier emergence than children learning other languages?) and within a given language, across grammatical constructions (i.e., do some grammatical constructions yield earlier emergence of productivity than others?)? This project addresses these questions by bringing together two usually-separate strands in language acquisition research. First, this will be one of the first studies of children's early grammatical productivity to take a cross- linguistic approach, focusing on three languages which have been selected to enable multiple types of comparisons. Second, this will be one of the first cross-linguistic studies of early grammatical knowledge to have comprehension at its core, as children's emerging productivity will be assessed via the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPL). Children's early grammatical productivity in verb morphology and syntax will be assessed in English, French, and Turkish. These languages vary most obviously in their reliance on word order (English) versus verbal inflections (i.e., clitic pronouns; French) versus nominal inflections (Turkish) for marking argument structure in the basic clause. Four sets of experiments, which investigate the acquisition of language-specific argument structure will be conducted. These ask when children demonstrate productivity with word order (Study 1), verbal morphology relevant to thematic relations (Study 2), noun case markings (Study 3), and structural bootstrapping (Study 4). Comparisons will be made across languages for each experiment and across experiments for each language. This research could reveal when children's language abilities become adult-like in one important way. Its focus on comprehension and its comparison of different languages could reveal how the age of this ability depends on the task (understanding rather than speaking) and the language being learned. This research thus could provide information about language- and task-specific milestones for assessing children with language disorders.

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目旨在调查儿童语言习得中的两个关键问题：（1）幼儿何时表现出语法生产力的证据？(2)这种生产力的出现是如何变化的，无论是跨语言的（即，学习某些语言的儿童是否比学习其他语言的儿童更早出现？并且在给定语言内，跨语法结构（即，某些语法结构是否比其他语法结构更早地产生生产力？这个项目通过将语言习得研究中两个通常独立的部分结合在一起来解决这些问题。首先，这将是第一个研究儿童的早期语法生产力，采取跨语言的方法，重点是三种语言，已被选定，使多种类型的比较。其次，这将是第一个跨语言的早期语法知识的研究，以理解为核心，儿童的新兴生产力将通过多式联运优先寻找范式（IPL）进行评估。儿童在动词形态和句法的早期语法生产力将在英语，法语和土耳其语进行评估。这些语言的差异最明显的是它们对词序（英语）和动词变化（即，主格代词（法语）与名词性屈折变化（土耳其语）在基本从句中标记论元结构。本研究共进行了四组实验，旨在考察语言特有论元结构的习得。这些问题，当孩子们表现出生产力与词序（研究1），动词形态相关的主题关系（研究2），名词格标记（研究3），和结构自举（研究4）。将对每项实验进行跨语言比较，并对每种语言进行跨实验比较。这项研究可以揭示儿童的语言能力何时以一种重要的方式变得像成人一样。它对理解的关注和对不同语言的比较可以揭示这种能力的年龄如何取决于任务（理解而不是说）和正在学习的语言。因此，这项研究可以提供有关评估语言障碍儿童的语言和任务特定里程碑的信息。