Simple strategies to accelerate children's early grammatical growth

描述（由申请人提供）：儿童使用识字口语风格的能力，包括精确的词汇和详细的语法结构，是阅读准备和学校成功的重要基础。以往的研究主要集中在父母语言输入对儿童词汇增长的个体差异的贡献。然而，少得多的是已知的贡献，父母的语言输入幼儿的语法发展的个体差异，创造了一个经验障碍，进一步发展的成本效益的早期语法干预。在以前的研究中，我们已经证明，儿童在21至30个月大的时候，在时态和一致性的生产性使用方面存在显著的个体差异（Hadley & Holt，2006年; Rispoli，Hadley，& Holt，2009），我们还发现了父母对21个月大的幼儿的语言输入的抽象语法特性，这些特性有助于观察到的儿童之间的差异（Hadley，Rispoli，Fitzgerald，& Bahnsen，in press）.拟议的项目建立在我们之前的成功建模语法的增长在3岁以下的儿童，调查生物，发展和输入预测语法的增长，并了解句子的多样性，语言类型和父母的互动风格影响成人输入的语法丰富性的方式。本计画将透过家长教育的介入，发展并评估新的以心理语言学为动机的语言模型策略的成效。将招募24名幼儿-父母配对。父母将学习谈论他们的孩子正在玩的玩具的动作，状态和属性，并使用特定的名词标签而不是代词（例如，鼻子适合，而不是适合）。这种新策略被称为“玩具谈话”。“父母的输入和儿童的语法增长将与现有的无治疗对照组进行比较。具体目标涉及：（a）与对照组的父母相比，玩具谈话干预组的父母是否提供了更丰富的语法输入，以及（B）这种输入修改是否加速了干预组中21至30个月大的儿童的语法发展。因为玩具谈话策略预计会增加第三人称词汇名词短语（NP）在主语位置的使用，所以父母的整体输入句子多样性（即，独特的主语-词汇动词组合）和时态/一致标记的输入信息量也应该增加。我们还假设，在成人输入的词汇NP主题的存在会加强儿童的主语/谓语关系的抽象语法表征。这反过来，预计将支持整合的小句水平的语法特征的时态和主谓一致的表示，导致更快速的语法增长的儿童在干预组相对于控制组。如果成功的话，这个项目将建立句子多样性的中心地位，发展的时态和协议，并提供关键的理论信息，儿童如何利用输入的语法习得。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children's ability to use a literate oral language style, consisting of precise vocabulary and elaborated grammatical structures, is an important foundation for reading readiness and school success. Previous research has focused on the contribution of parent language input to individual differences in children's vocabulary growth. However, much less is known about the contribution of parent language input to individual differences in young children's grammatical development, creating an empirical barrier to the further development of cost-effective early grammatical interventions. In previous research, we have demonstrated that significant individual differences in children's productive use of tense and agreement appear between 21 and 30 months of age (Hadley & Holt, 2006; Rispoli, Hadley, & Holt, 2009), and we have also identified abstract grammatical properties of parents' language input to their 21-month-old toddlers that contribute to the observed between-child differences (Hadley, Rispoli, Fitzgerald, & Bahnsen, in press). The proposed project builds upon our prior success modeling grammatical growth in children under age 3, investigating biological, developmental, and input predictors of grammatical growth, and understanding the way in which sentence diversity, language typology, and parent interaction style influence the grammatical richness of adult input. This project will develop and evaluate the effectiveness of new psycholinguistically-motivated language modeling strategies through a parent education intervention. Twenty-four toddler-parent dyads will be recruited. Parents will learn to talk about the actions, states, and properties of the toys their children are playing with and to use specific noun labels rather than pronouns (e.g., The nose fits, NOT It fits). This new strategy is referred to as "toy talk." Parent input and children's grammatical growth will be compared to an existing no-treatment control group. The specific aims address: (a) whether parents in the toy talk intervention provide richer grammatical input in comparison to parents in the control group, and (b) whether such input modifications accelerate the grammatical development of children in the intervention group between 21 and 30 months of age. Because toy talk strategies are expected to increase the use of 3rd person lexical noun phrases (NP) in subject position, parents' overall input sentence diversity (i.e., unique subject-lexical verb combinations) and input informativeness for tense/agreement marking should also increase. We also hypothesize that the presence of lexical NP subjects in the adult input will strengthen children's abstract grammatical representation of the subject / predicate relation. This, in turn, is expected to support the integration of the clause level grammatical features of tense and subject-verb agreement into the representation, resulting in more rapid grammatical growth for children in the intervention group relative to the control group. If successful, this project will establish the centrality of sentence diversity to the development of tense and agreement and provide crucial theoretical information about how children make use of input in the acquisition of grammar.