Linking Early Linguistic and Conceptual Development

连接早期语言和概念发展

• 批准号: 7932490
• 负责人: SANDRA R WAXMAN
• 金额: $ 15.41万
• 依托单位: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-30 至 2010-09-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7932490
• 关键词: Address; Attention; Basic Science; Categories; Child; Complex; Development; Environment; Event; Evolution; Foundations; Goals; Human; Infant; Language; Language Development; Learning; Life; Linguistics; Link; Maps; Methods; Motion; Process; Property; Recruitment Activity; Research; Role; Semantics; Series; Shapes; Specific qualifier value; Staging; Structure; System; Testing; Time; Work; base; bilingualism; design; expectation; experience; flexibility; forging; insight; lexical; novel; specific language impairment; syntax; theories

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal addresses fundamental issues of early conceptual development, language development, and the relation between them. Infants live in an enormously rich environment. Each day, they encounter new objects and witness new events. This richness would be overwhelming if each object or event was treated as unique. Therefore, an essential developmental task is to form concepts to capture commonalities among their experiences and to learn words to express these. Recent research reveals powerful and implicit links between conceptual and linguistic organization, across development and across languages. Infants begin the task of word-learning with a broad initial expectation linking novel words to a broad range of commonalities. More specific expectations, linking particular kinds of words (e.g., noun, adjective, verb) to particular kinds of relations (e.g., category-, property-, and motion-based commonalities) emerge several months later, and are shaped by the structure of the native language. The current proposal deepens the insights gained in the previous period and brings us closer to understanding the origin, evolution, and universality of these links between conceptual and linguistic organization. The studies in Section I trace the origin and evolution of infants' expectations at several strategic developmental points. The section includes new methods to identify the mechanisms underlying infants' ability to distinguish among different kinds of words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and map them appropriately to their associated meaning. The studies in Section II sharpen the evidence for these links in infants and children acquiring languages other than English (French; Mandarin). By combining developmental and cross-linguistic approaches, the proposed project 1) broadens the empirical and theoretical foundations of existing research, 2) provides a window through which to view more clearly the origins and evolution of links between conceptual and linguistic development, and 3) underscores the vital interaction between the expectations inherent in the child and the shaping role of the environment. The results should have implications for theories of acquisition and may serve as a springboard for research on bilingualism and specific language impairments in young children.

描述（由申请人提供）：该提案涉及早期概念发展，语言发展以及它们之间的关系的基本问题。婴儿生活在极其丰富的环境中。每一天，他们都会遇到新的物体，见证新的事件。如果每个物体或事件都被视为独特的，这种丰富性将是压倒性的。因此，一项重要的发展任务是形成概念，以捕捉他们的经验中的共性，并学习表达这些的单词。最近的研究揭示了跨发展和跨语言的概念和语言组织之间强大而隐含的联系。婴儿开始单词学习的任务时，有一个广泛的初始期望，将新单词与广泛的共性联系起来。更具体的期望，连接特定类型的单词（例如，名词、形容词、动词）到特定种类的关系（例如，基于类别、属性和运动的共性）在几个月后出现，并由母语的结构形成。目前的建议深化了在前一阶段获得的见解，使我们更接近于理解概念和语言组织之间的这些联系的起源，演变和普遍性。第一部分的研究追溯了婴儿期望在几个战略发展点上的起源和演变。该部分包括新的方法来识别婴儿区分不同种类的单词（名词，形容词，动词）的能力的机制，并将它们适当地映射到它们的相关含义。第二部分的研究进一步证明了婴儿和儿童在学习英语以外的语言（法语、汉语）时存在这种联系。通过结合发展和跨语言的方法，拟议的项目1）拓宽了现有研究的经验和理论基础，2）提供了一个窗口，通过它可以更清楚地查看概念和语言发展之间的联系的起源和演变，和3）强调儿童内在的期望和环境的塑造作用之间的重要相互作用。研究结果对习得理论有一定的启示，并可作为幼儿双语和特定语言障碍研究的跳板。

项目成果

Meaning from syntax: evidence from 2-year-olds.

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.10.015
• 发表时间: 2010-03
• 期刊: Cognition
• 影响因子: 3.4
• 作者: Arunachalam S;Waxman SR
• 通讯作者: Waxman SR

Learning from infants' first verbs.

从婴儿的第一个动词中学习。

• DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5834.2009.00527.x
• 发表时间: 2009
• 期刊: Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
• 影响因子: 9.5
• 作者: Waxman,SandraR

What's in the input? Frequent frames in child-directed speech offer distributional cues to grammatical categories in Spanish and English.

输入内容是什么？

• DOI: 10.1017/s0305000909990067
• 发表时间: 2010
• 期刊: Journal of child language
• 影响因子: 2.2
• 作者: Weisleder,Adriana;Waxman,SandraR
• 通讯作者: Waxman,SandraR

Are Nouns Learned Before Verbs? Infants Provide Insight into a Longstanding Debate.

名词是先学还是动词？

• DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12032
• 发表时间: 2013
• 期刊: Child development perspectives
• 影响因子: 6.4
• 作者: Waxman,Sandra;Fu,Xiaolan;Arunachalam,Sudha;Leddon,Erin;Geraghty,Kathleen;Song,Hyun-Joo
• 通讯作者: Song,Hyun-Joo

Tight and loose are not created equal: an asymmetry underlying the representation of fit in English- and Korean-speakers.

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.019
• 发表时间: 2008-12
• 期刊: Cognition
• 影响因子: 3.4
• 作者: Norbury HM;Waxman SR;Song HJ
• 通讯作者: Song HJ