THE DEVELOPMENT OF ON - LINE SENTENCE PROCESSING IN CHILDREN

项目摘要 这个项目的目标是了解儿童（和年龄较大的第二语言学习者）如何发现 词的意义及其在句子中的语义角色。即使是像“狗”这样简单的词， 从观察（就像人们通常会做的那样）有一只狗在视线中来收集他们的意思。毕竟，当一只狗 它的皮毛、耳朵和快乐的尾巴都在眼前。这些因素或属性中的哪一个 当一个成年人说“看那只小狗！“当孩子们 必须学习像“想法”或“思考”这样的词的含义，因为在这些情况下， 指向外面的世界然而，三四岁的孩子却能理解并说出这样的话。 “抽象”的词语。我们的项目从观察出发，不是所有的单词都出现在同一个单词中。 例如，一个人可以说“我认为（或看到）你很可爱”，但不能说“我跳你很可爱。" 引人注目的是，只有两三岁的孩子对这些“位置特权”很敏感， 反过来又为词义提供线索。因为很难获得有关儿童词义的信息， 我们通过询问他们的定义或类似的方法来帮助他们学习，我们使用隐含的方法，如跟踪儿童的眼睛 注视方向和对将单词置于不同视觉社会环境中的查询的响应性， 不同的句法结构，以了解他们不断发展的词汇知识。这些问题远不止 学术兴趣。没有测试的儿童认知或行为的属性是一个更好的预测学校， 工作场所的成功比在生命的最初几年词汇量的增长更重要。儿童的词汇成绩各不相同 在第二个生日之前，社会经济地位较高或较低，这些差异会增加 在整个学年，影响所有儿童的后续学习。所以我们的工作延伸到发现 实际的家庭和早期学校环境可以最大限度地提高词汇量的支持环境 和语法获取。我们过去的工作有力地表明，这些有利的学习环境 目前的建议更深入地探讨了这些因素。

Project Summary The goal of this project is to understand how children (and older second-language learners) discover the meanings of words and their semantic roles in sentences. Even for simple words like "dog" it is not easy to glean what they mean from observing (as one usually will) that there is a dog in sight. For after all, when a dog is in sight, so is his fur, and his ear, and the joyous wagging of his tail. To which of these factors or properties does the pointing finger refer when an adult says "Look at that doggie!" Things get even harder when the child has to learn the meanings of words like "idea" or "think" because in these cases there's nothing so obvious to point to out there in the world. Yet children of three and four years of age understand and utter such apparently "abstract" words. Our projects take off from the observation that not all words occur in the same places in sentences, for instance one can say "I think (or see) that you're cute" but not "I jump that you're cute." Strikingly, children as young as two- and three-years of age are sensitive to these "positional privileges," which in turn give clues to word meaning. Because it is hard to get information about children's word meanings or their learning by asking them for definitions or the like, we use implicit methods such as tracking children's eye gaze direction and responsiveness to queries that place words into different visuo-social environments and into different syntactic structures to find out about their evolving word knowledge. These issues are of much more than academic interest. No tested property of child cognition or behavior is a better predictor of school and work-place success than vocabulary growth in the first few years of life. Vocabulary scores diverge for children of higher or lower socio-economic status as early as the second birthday, and these differences increase throughout the school years, influencing all the child's subsequent learning. So our work extends to discovering ways that actual home and early school environments can maximize the supportive environment for vocabulary and syntax acquisition. Our past work gives strong indications of what these favorable learning environments are, and the present proposal inquires more deeply into these factors.