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，包括精确的词汇和复杂的语法结构，是阅读准备和学业成功的重要基础。以往的研究主要集中在父母语言输入对儿童词汇增长个体差异的影响上。然而，关于父母语言输入对幼儿语法发展的个体差异的贡献知之甚少，这为进一步发展具有成本效益的早期语法干预创造了经验障碍。在之前的研究中，我们已经证明了21到30个月大的孩子在时态和一致的有效使用上出现了显著的个体差异（Hadley & Holt, 2006; 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属性，这有助于观察到儿童之间的差异（Hadley, Rispoli, Fitzgerald, & Bahnsen，出版）。该项目建立在我们之前成功的3岁以下儿童语法增长模型的基础上，调查语法增长的生物学、发育和输入预测因素，并理解句子多样性、语言类型和父母互动方式对成人输入的语法丰富性的影响。本项目将通过家长教育干预开发和评估新的心理语言动机语言建模策略的有效性。将招募24对蹒跚学步的父母。父母将学会谈论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，鼻子合适，不合适）。这种新策略被称为“玩具谈话”。父母的输入和孩子的语法增长将与现有的无治疗对照组进行比较。研究的具体目的是：(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21至30个月大的干预组儿童的语法发展。由于玩具谈话策略有望增加主语位置第三人称词汇名词短语（NP）的使用，因此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/一致性标记的输入信息性也应该增加。我们还假设，成人输入中词汇NP主语的存在会加强儿童对主谓关系的抽象语法表征。反过来，这有望支持将时态和主谓一致的子句级语法特征整合到表征中，从而使干预组儿童的语法增长速度相对于对照组更快。如果成功，该项目将确立句子多样性在时态和一致性发展中的中心地位，并为儿童如何在语法习得中利用输入提供重要的理论信息。

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.