The Development of On Line Sentence Processing In Children

描述(由申请者提供)：这个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像“狗”和“猫”这样的词的含义。第二个问题是学习这些词在句子中如何在语义上组合，比如“狗咬猫”和“猫咬狗”。虽然本例中的单词都是相同的，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“咬人”行为方面的语义角色(do-er或do-to)。一些语言很少使用这种排序方法，如果他们这样做了，他们的排序可能会不同，所以英语学习者必须通过分析他们从成年人那里听到的语音来获得这些特性，以得出英语事实。在大多数情况下，孩子们不会得到关于大多数词义或句法的明确指导，但他们仍然会学习。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。本文建议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早先获得这笔资金的情况下开发的，在这种技术中，当孩子们听到对周围视觉世界的口头描述时，他们的眼睛被跟踪。具体地说，孩子们听到的指令要求他们就模棱两可的话语的预期结构组织做出含蓄的选择，比如“我用望远镜看到了那个人。”通过操纵预期结构的潜在信息线索(例如，动词信息、韵律信息和情景/话语线索)，儿童的眼睛凝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，我们建议：(A)通过检查不同年龄儿童对歧义句子的眼神凝视反应，扩大和测试我们关于儿童如何在听到句子时学习恢复句子语法属性的发展描述；(B)探索儿童如何使用关于说话者意图的多种语言和非语言线索来揭示单词和句子的含义；(C)检查儿童在听到动词和其他关系词汇项时跟踪它们的含义；(D)研究句子理解程序是如何在不同于英语的语言中学习和使用的(具体而言，韩语、他加路语和卡纳达语，或许还有另外两种)。这些发现在教育中的潜在应用意义重大，因为词汇和句子理解技能是在21世纪的技术文化中成功发挥作用的基础，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，并越来越多地参与全球互动，掌握第二、甚至第三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，对公共卫生具有重要意义。该项目旨在促进儿童如何学习他们语言中的单词的含义，以及这些单词是如何组合在一起构成有意义的句子的。快速、近乎无误地理解语言和书面语言的能力是21世纪美国人生活中经济和社会福祉的基本要求。这一发现预计也将与第二语言学习相关；对美国人来说，多语言是一种越来越宝贵的商品，因为他们越来越多地与说不同语言的人互动，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.