The Development of On Line Sentence Processing In Children

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目旨在发现语言是如何学习和理解的单词和句子的水平。我们要解决的第一个问题是理解学习者如何发现“狗”和“猫”等词的含义。第二个问题是学习这些单词在句子中如何语义联合收割机，比如“狗咬猫”和“猫咬狗”。虽然在这种情况下，这些词都是相同的，但在英语中，它们的顺序（更准确地说，是约束它们的结构）决定了它们在“咬”行为方面的语义角色（do-er或done-to）。有些语言很少使用这种排序方法，如果他们这样做，他们的顺序可能会有所不同，所以英语学习者必须通过分析他们从成年人那里听到的演讲来获得这些属性，以获得英语事实。在大多数情况下，孩子们并没有得到关于大多数单词含义或语法的明确指导，但他们仍然学习。学习过程不仅适用于儿童，也适用于包括成年人在内的老年人学习第二语言。本文提出的大部分工作使用了一种相对较新的实验技术，该技术是在我们的实验室中开发的，该技术是在本基金的早期资助下开发的，在该技术中，当儿童听到周围视觉世界的口头描述时，他们的眼睛注视被跟踪。具体来说，孩子们听到的指令要求他们对模棱两可的话语的预期结构组织做出隐含的选择，例如“我看到了那个拿着望远镜的人。“通过操纵潜在的信息线索，以预期的结构（例如，动词信息、韵律信息和情景/话语线索）、儿童的眼睛注视和其他行为可以揭示他们对这些信息源的敏感性和表征。在即将到来的资助期内，我们建议：（a）通过研究不同年龄的儿童对歧义句子的眼睛注视反应，扩展和测试我们关于儿童如何学习恢复句子语法特性的发展理论;（B）探索儿童如何使用与说话者意图有关的多种语言和非语言线索来揭示单词和句子的含义;（c）检查孩子在听到动词和其他相关词汇时，对动词和其他相关词汇的意义有何印象;（d）检查在与英语提供的意义线索截然不同的语言（具体来说，韩语、塔吉特语和卡纳达语，也许还有其他两种）中，句子理解程序是如何学习和使用的。这些研究结果在教育方面的潜在应用意义重大，因为词汇和句子理解技能是在世纪技术文化中成功运作的基础，许多儿童需要加强和补救干预。此外，随着美国公民越来越多地使用多种语言，越来越多地参与全球互动，掌握第二语言，甚至第三语言和第四语言的能力成为一种越来越宝贵的社会和经济商品。以及这些词如何组合成有意义的句子。快速准确地理解口语和书面语的能力是21世纪世纪美国经济和社会福利的基本要求。这些发现预计也与第二语言学习有关;多语言能力对美国人来说是一种越来越宝贵的商品，因为他们越来越多地与不同语言的人互动，无论是与国家还是与世界各地的文化。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project aims to discover how languages are learned and understood at the levels of both word and sentence. The first problem we address is understanding how learners find out what words such as "dog" and "cat" signify. The second problem is learning how these words combine semantically in sentences such as "The dog bites the cat" versus "The cat bites the dog." Though the words in this case are all the same ones, in English their ordering (more precisely, the structure that binds them) determines their semantic roles (do-er or done-to) with respect to the "biting" act. Some languages rarely use this ordering method and if they do their orders may be different, so learners of English have to acquire these properties by analyzing the speech that they hear from adults to derive the English facts. In most cases children don't get explicit instruction about most of the word meanings or about the syntax, but they learn even so. The learning process applies not only to children but also to learning of second languages by older individuals, including adults. Much of the work proposed herein uses a relatively new experimental technique, developed in our laboratories under earlier funding of this grant, in which children's eye gaze is tracked as they hear spoken descriptions of the surrounding visual world. Specifically, children hear instructions that require them to make an implicit choice about the intended structural organization of ambiguous utterances such as "I saw the man with a telescope." By manipulating potentially informative cues to the intended structure (e.g., verb information, prosodic (tune) information and situational/discourse cues), children's eye gaze and other behaviors can reveal their sensitivity to and representation of these information sources. In the upcoming funding period, we propose: (a) To expand and test our developmental account of how children learn to recover the grammatical properties of a sentence as it is heard, by examining eye gaze responses to ambiguous sentences at different ages; (b) To explore how multiple linguistic and non-linguistic cues regarding speaker's intentions are used by the child to uncover word and sentence meaning; (c) To examine what is tracked by the child regarding the meaning of verbs and other relational lexical items as they hear them; (d) To examine how sentences understanding procedures are learned and used in languages that are quite different from English in the clues to meaning that they offer (specifically, Korean, Tagalog, and Kannada, and perhaps two others). The potential applications of these findings to education are significant, as vocabulary and sentence understanding skills are fundamental to successful functioning in the technological culture of the 21st century, and many children are in need of enhancing and remedial intervention. In addition, as the United States citizenry becomes progressively more multilingual, and is increasingly drawn into global interactions, the ability to acquire second, and even third and fourth, languages becomes an ever more precious social and economic commodity PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE This project is designed to further the understanding of how young children learn what the words in their language mean, and how these words are combined to make meaningful sentences. The ability to understand spoken and written language rapidly and close to errorlessly is a basic requirement for economic and social well-being in 21st Century American life. The findings are expected to be relevant to second language learning as well; multilingualism is an increasingly precious commodity for Americans as they interact more and more with speakers of different languages both with the country and with cultures around the world.