Modeling Word Learning Trajectories

描述（由申请人提供）：在典型的发展过程中，单词学习从缓慢和费力到看似快速和毫不费力。正常发育的3岁儿童在学习名词类别方面非常熟练，他们似乎从听到一个单独的例子就能凭直觉知道这个类别中的所有事物。当孩子们学习这些早期词汇时，他们似乎也学会了抽象的概括，关于名词如何映射到不同种类的类别。这些抽象的特定种类的概括反过来又加速了随后的名词学习。对于那些词汇量低于15 -20百分位的孩子（晚说话者）来说，情况就不一定了。虽然词汇量测量在群体层面上具有连续性，但不能根据词汇产生或理解来准确预测个体儿童的结果。本研究旨在了解在儿童个体名词学习中形成发展轨迹的力量。为此，我建议：1)研究不同的儿童群体，包括早说话和晚说话的儿童；2)研究个体发展轨迹以及经验与这些个体趋势特征之间的关系；3)建立并测试名词学习的计算模型，通过这些模型，我们可以从儿童当前词汇的构成中预测儿童未来的单词学习；4)尝试通过提供专注和丰富的体验来扰乱这些发展轨迹。了解不同的因素是如何改变具有不同发展概况的儿童个体的名词学习路径的，应该使我们既可以预测个体儿童可能的发展轨迹，也可以预测可能影响这一轨迹的各种经历。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In typical development, word learning goes from slow and laborious to seemingly rapid and effortless. Typically developing 3-year-olds are so skilled at learning noun categories that they seem to intuit the whole range of things in the category from hearing a single instance named. As children learn these early vocabularies, they also seem to learn abstract generalities about how nouns map to different kinds of categories. These abstract kind-specific generalizations in turn speed up subsequent noun learning. This is not necessarily the case for children below the 15th-20th percentile on productive vocabulary (late talkers). Although there is continuity in vocabulary measures at the group level, the outcome for individual children cannot be accurately predicted on the basis of vocabulary production or comprehension. The proposed research seeks to understand the forces that create the developmental trajectories in the noun learning of individual children. To that end, I propose to 1) study different groups of children, including early and late talkers, 2) study individual developmental trajectories and the relation between experiences and the characteristics of those individual trends, 3) build and test computational models of noun learning through which we can predict the future word learning of a child from the composition of that child's current vocabulary and, 4) attempt to perturb these developmental trajectories by offering focused and enriching experiences. Understanding how different factors change the noun learning pathways in individual children with different developmental profiles should allow us to both predict the likely developmental trajectories for individual children and the sorts of experiences that may impact this trajectory.