Basic mechanisms of language's effect on attention and learning

描述(申请人提供)：我们在任何时刻关注的东西决定了我们在那个时刻学到了什么，这也取决于我们过去的学习。这项授权调查了单词、感知线索和类别组织如何形成一个关联系统，根据上下文提示注意力，使其精确地调整到上下文，从而限制和推动未来的学习。尽管旧的观点认为联想学习是对个人配对的简单计数，但更先进的理论认为，人们学习重叠的联想系统，(1)导致对注意力的系统影响，(2)根据背景调整学习，以及(3)产生更高顺序(几乎类似规则)的关联。这项资助试图在单词学习环境中对这些过程进行机械性的理解。24至48个月大的儿童将参加这些实验，其中包括人工语言学习、训练任务，以及学习两种不同语言(英语和日语)、具有不同关联系统的儿童的比较。了解语境引导注意力的基本过程，以及语言如何以及为什么可能成为引起注意力的特别有力的线索，是理解语言延迟对认知发展的连锁后果以及发明新的方法来调整注意力的第一步，当学习者不容易获得语言时。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): What we attend to at any moment determines what we learn at that moment, and this also depends on our past learning. This grant investigates how words, perceptual cues, and category organizations form a system of associations that contextually cue attention, making it exquisitely tuned to context and thus constraining and propelling future learning. Although old views characterized associative learning as simple counting of individual pairings, more advanced theories suggest that people learn systems of overlapping associations that (1) lead to systematic effects on attention, (2) tune learning to the context, and (3) give rise to higher-order (almost rule-like) correlations. This grant seeks a mechanistic understanding of these processes in word learning context. Twenty- four to 48-months-old children will participate in the experiments containing artificial language learning, training tasks, and the comparison of children learning two different languages (English and Japanese), with different systems of correlations. Understanding the basic processes through which context guides attention and how and why language might be a particularly potent cue to attention is a first step toward understanding the cascading consequences of language delay on cognitive development and the invention of new methods for tuning attention when language is not easily available to the learner.