THE DEVELOPMENT OF ON - LINE SENTENCE PROCESSING IN CHILDREN

描述（由申请人提供）：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）如何发现单词的含义及其在句子中的语义角色。即使是像“狗”这样简单的词，也不容易通过观察（人们通常会这样做）来了解它们的意思。毕竟，当一只狗出现在你的视线中，你就会看到它的毛，它的耳朵，它欢快地摇尾巴。当一个成年人说“看那只狗！”时，手指指的是这些因素或属性中的哪一个？当孩子们不得不学习像“想法”或“思考”这样的词的含义时，事情变得更加困难，因为在这些情况下，世界上没有什么比这更明显的东西可以指出来。然而三、四岁的孩子却能理解并说出这些看似“抽象”的词语。我们的项目源于观察，即并非所有单词都出现在句子中的相同位置，例如，一个人可以说“I think（或see） that you're cute”，但不能说“I jump that you're cute”。引人注目的是，两岁和三岁的孩子对这些“位置特权”很敏感，这反过来又为单词的含义提供了线索。由于很难通过询问孩子的定义或类似的方式获得关于孩子的单词含义或他们的学习信息，我们使用隐式方法，如跟踪孩子的眼睛注视方向和对将单词置于不同的视觉社会环境和不同的句法结构的查询的反应，以了解他们不断发展的单词知识。这些问题的意义远远超过学术兴趣。没有任何一项经测试的儿童认知或行为特征比生命最初几年的词汇增长更能预测孩子在学校和工作场所的成功。社会经济地位高的孩子和社会经济地位低的孩子的词汇分数早在两岁生日时就出现了差异，这些差异在整个学年中都在增加，影响了孩子随后的所有学习。因此，我们的工作扩展到发现实际的家庭和早期学校环境可以最大限度地支持词汇和语法习得的方法。我们过去的工作有力地说明了这些有利的学习环境是什么，而目前的应用程序更深入地探究了这些因素。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): 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 propertie 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 year olds 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 a two- and three-year olds are sensitive to these "positional privileges," which in turn give clues t 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 application inquires more deeply into these factors.