Functional morphemes and mechanisms of early language processing

早期语言处理的功能语素和机制

• 批准号: 261500-2008
• 负责人: Shi, Rushen
• 金额: $ 1.74万
• 依托单位: Université du Québec à Montréal
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2008-01-01 至 2009-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=395048
• 关键词: Functional; morphemes; mechanisms; early; language

Infants face many challenges during early language development. Spoken words are not separated by blank spaces. Infants must find word forms from running speech, much like the challenge we face when we first hear a foreign language. In addition, infants must classify words into grammatical categories such as nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc. They also need to map word forms to appropriate meanings. These tasks are not trivial because parents provide neither explicit lessons, nor overt feedback to infants. Based on the theory that I have proposed, the solution to these problems may lie in the processing of function morphemes (such as auxiliaries, articles, etc). These elements are extremely frequent in the language and have distinct spoken forms when compared to content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs). Previous research including studies from my research group showed that infants during the first year of life can perceive function morphemes and use these items to find words from running speech. As part of my long-term NSERC program, the proposed research will test the hypothesis that infants rely on function morphemes to break into early language. We will examine the role of function morphemes in infants' initial learning of morphological parsing (for example, the interpretation of word roots and suffixes), grammatical categorisation of words, and mapping of meanings to word forms. In doing so, we will specifically investigate the interactions of different learning mechanisms (for example, frequency versus prosodically based learning) associated with function morphemes, and attempt to determine the influence of the native language to infants' initial biases. These studies may contribute to the fundamental debate on the nature-nurture question in language acquisition.

婴儿在早期语言发展过程中面临许多挑战。口语单词不用空格隔开。婴儿必须从说话中找到单词形式，就像我们第一次听到一门外语时所面临的挑战一样。此外，婴儿必须将单词分类为语法类别，如名词、动词、介词等。他们还需要将单词的形式映射到适当的含义。这些任务不是微不足道的，因为父母既不给婴儿明确的教训，也不给婴儿公开的反馈。根据我提出的理论，解决这些问题的办法可能在于对功能语素(如助词、冠词等)的加工。这些成分在语言中非常常见，与实词(名词、动词、形容词和副词)相比，它们的口语形式截然不同。之前的研究，包括我的研究小组的研究表明，婴儿在出生第一年就可以感知功能语素，并使用这些项目从连续的语音中找到单词。作为我长期NSERC计划的一部分，这项拟议的研究将检验婴儿依赖功能语素进入早期语言的假设。我们将考察功能语素在婴儿最初学习形态分析(例如，词根和词缀的解释)、单词的语法分类以及将含义映射到单词形式中的作用。为此，我们将具体研究与功能语素相关的不同学习机制(例如，基于频率的学习与基于韵律的学习)的交互作用，并试图确定母语对婴儿初始偏见的影响。这些研究可能有助于对语言习得中的先天-后天问题进行根本性的辩论。