The Development of On Line Sentence Processing In Children

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目旨在发现语言是如何在单词和句子两个层面上学习和理解的。我们要解决的第一个问题是理解学习者如何找出“狗”和“猫”等单词的含义。第二个问题是学习这些单词在句子中的语义组合，比如“狗咬猫”和“猫咬狗”。虽然在这种情况下，这些单词都是相同的，但在英语中，它们的顺序（更准确地说，是连接它们的结构）决定了它们在“咬”行为方面的语义角色（do-er或do- to）。有些语言很少使用这种排序方法，即使使用，顺序也可能不同，所以英语学习者必须通过分析他们从成年人那里听到的言语来获得这些属性，从而得出英语事实。在大多数情况下，孩子们没有得到关于大多数单词的含义或语法的明确指导，但他们还是学会了。学习过程不仅适用于儿童，也适用于老年人（包括成年人）学习第二语言。本文提出的大部分工作都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在这项拨款的早期资助下开发的，在该技术中，当儿童听到对周围视觉世界的口头描述时，跟踪他们的眼睛注视。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，比如“我看到那个拿望远镜的人”。通过操纵潜在的信息线索（如动词信息、韵律（曲调）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模棱两可的句子的眼神反应，扩展和测试我们关于儿童如何在听到句子时学习恢复句子的语法特性的发展理论；(b)探索儿童如何利用与说话人意图有关的多种语言和非语言线索来揭示单词和句子的意义；(c)检查儿童在听到动词和其他关系词汇项目时所追踪到的含义；(d)研究句子理解程序是如何在与英语完全不同的语言中学习和使用的，这些语言提供的意义线索（特别是朝鲜语、他加禄语和卡纳达语，也许还有其他两种）。这些发现对教育的潜在应用意义重大，因为词汇和句子理解技能是21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掌握多种语言，越来越多地参与全球互动，掌握第二种甚至第三种和第四种语言的能力成为一种越来越宝贵的社会和经济商品

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