Modeling Word Learning Trajectories

描述(申请人提供)：在典型的发展过程中，单词学习从缓慢而费力的转变为看似快速而毫不费力的。一般来说，发展中的3岁儿童非常擅长学习名词类别，以至于他们似乎通过听到一个名为的例子就能直觉地感知到类别中的所有事物。随着孩子们学习这些早期的词汇，他们似乎也学会了关于名词如何映射到不同类别的抽象概括性知识。这些抽象的、特定于种类的概括反过来又加速了后续的名词学习。在产出性词汇量低于15-20个百分位数的儿童(说话迟缓的人)，情况就不一定是这样。尽管在群体层面上的词汇测量具有连续性，但不能根据词汇产出或理解来准确预测单个儿童的结果。这项拟议的研究试图了解在个别儿童的名词学习中创造发展轨迹的力量。为此，我建议1)研究不同的儿童群体，包括说话早和晚的人；2)研究个体的发展轨迹以及个人发展轨迹和经验与这些个体趋势特征之间的关系；3)建立和测试名词学习的计算模型，通过这些模型，我们可以根据儿童当前词汇的组成来预测孩子未来的单词学习；4)试图通过提供集中和丰富的经验来扰乱这些发展轨迹。了解不同因素如何改变具有不同发展特征的个体儿童的名词学习路径，应该可以让我们既预测个体儿童可能的发展轨迹，也允许我们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.