Mechanisms of Word Learning in Infancy

描述(由申请人提供)：确定婴儿如何从他们听到的语言和他们周围的世界中学习单词，而不是仅仅通过实验室内高度受限的措施，对于理解语言习得至关重要。这项拟议的研究涉及在一年的关键时间范围内(6-18个月)每月录制婴儿与父母的互动。在此期间，这些婴儿和其他婴儿将在实验室接受测试，以检查他们对已知和新的视觉刺激的眼动和单词学习，以检验经验、熟悉度、语言结构、语音-声音和语义属性对单词学习的影响。这个项目的两个具体目标如下：1.确定婴儿的日常经验如何导致单词学习，包括每天学习新词；2.开发质疑视觉(知觉)和语言(认知)过程之间联系的范例。该项目包括三个主要部分：家庭视频语料库，使用眼睛跟踪和启发方法的单词学习实验，以及使用语料库生成的视频的进一步实验和计算分析。一组关键的实验室研究使用的是被记录在家庭语料库中的婴儿。此外，这两组实验都包括没有参与语料库研究的婴儿，确保收集适当的基线和独立评估其成功不依赖于语料库工作的任何特定结果的预测者。该项目创建的大型视频库资源(包括技术创新的头戴式摄像机镜头)将为研究界增加一个独特的、免费提供的和迫切需要的资源。对于对婴儿早期听觉和视觉家庭环境感兴趣的科学家来说，这一资源将是无价的。虽然存在有限的婴儿视频语料库，但我们提议创建的那种丰富的资源目前还不可用。为分析视觉显著和概念/知觉学习而开发的范例将增加认知科学家可用的实验方法的武器库。更广泛地说，语料库分析、单词学习和视觉显著实验的结果将增加我们对具体和一般语言中单词学习的理解。这不仅是语言习得研究的重要目标，也是婴儿发育、认知科学、心理学、语言学、儿科学和语言病理学等领域的重要目标。这个项目提供了一个机会，通过建立一个标准的基线来推进语言习得的基本理论，这反过来又将允许改进对弱势背景婴儿的评估，以及作为未来研究的一个重要部分，对患有听觉、视觉和语言障碍的婴儿，如自闭症。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Identifying how infants learn words from the language they hear and the world around them, rather than through highly constrained in-laboratory measures alone, is crucial for understanding language acquisition. The proposed research involves videotaping infant-parent interactions monthly over the course of a year (between 6-18 months), during a critical time range for word learning. These same infants, along with others, will be tested in the laboratory during this period to examine their eye-movements and word learning in response to known and novel visual stimuli, in order to examine the effects of experience, familiarity, linguistic structure, speech- sounds, and semantic properties on word learning. The two specific aims of this project are as follows: 1. Determine how infants' daily experiences lead to word learning, with every day and novel words 2. Develop paradigms that query links between visual (perceptual) and linguistic (cognitive) processes. There are three main components of this project: an in-home video corpus, word learning experiments using eye tracking and elicitation methods, and further experiments and computational analyses using the corpus-generated videos. One key set of in-laboratory studies uses the infants who were recorded for the in-home corpus. Additionally, both sets of experiments include infants who do not partake in the corpus study, ensuring the collection of appropriate baselines and independent evaluation of predictors whose success does not rely on any specific outcome from the corpus work. The large video library resource created by this project (including technologically innovative head- mounted camera footage) would add a unique, freely available and sorely needed resource for the research community. This resource would be invaluable for scientists interested in aspects of infants' early auditory and visual home environment. While limited infant video corpora exist, the sort of rich resource we propose to create is currently unavailable. The paradigms developed for analyzing visual saliency and conceptual/ perceptual learning would add to the arsenal of experimental methods available to cognitive scientists. More broadly, the outcomes of the corpus analyses, word learning, and visual saliency experiments will increase our understanding of word learning in specific, and language in general. This is a critical aim not just for language acquisition research, but for the fields of infant development, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, pediatrics, and speech-language pathology as well. This project provides an opportunity for advancing fundamental theory in language acquisition by establishing a normative baseline, which, in turn will allow for improved assessments of infants from disadvantaged backgrounds, and for infants with auditory, visual, and language-based impairments, such as Autism, as an essential part of future research.