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: 2013
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2013-01-01 至 2014-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=525249
• 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。说出来的单词之间没有空格。婴儿必须从奔跑的言语中找到单词的形式，就像我们第一次听到一门外语时所面临的挑战一样。此外，婴儿必须将单词按语法分类，如名词、动词、介词等。他们还需要将单词形式映射到适当的含义。这些任务并非微不足道，因为父母既没有给婴儿提供明确的教训，也没有公开的反馈。根据我提出的理论，这些问题的解决可能在于功能语素的处理（如助词、冠词等）。这些元素在语言中非常常见，与实义词（名词、动词、形容词和副词）相比，它们有不同的口语形式。以前的研究，包括我的研究小组的研究表明，婴儿在一岁的时候可以感知功能语素，并使用这些项目从运行的言语中找到单词。作为我长期NSERC项目的一部分，这项拟议中的研究将检验婴儿依赖功能语素来进入早期语言的假设。我们将研究功能语素在婴儿最初学习形态分析（例如，词根和后缀的解释），单词的语法分类以及词义到词形的映射中的作用。在此过程中，我们将专门研究与功能语素相关的不同学习机制（例如，频率与韵律为基础的学习）的相互作用，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先天-后天问题的基本争论。