Lexical organization in bilingual infants

双语婴儿的词汇组织

• 批准号: 402470-2011
• 负责人: ByersHeinlein, Krista
• 金额: $ 2.11万
• 依托单位: Concordia University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2014-01-01 至 2015-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=550933
• 关键词: Lexical; organization; bilingual; infants

To successfully acquire their languages, infants growing up in a bilingual setting must encode input from two different languages simultaneously. My research focuses on how bilingual infants navigate, learn, and represent their two languages, as a window into how early language experience shapes language acquisition. This proposal explores a key component of language acquisition in the second year of life: acquiring a lexicon. Although several studies have investigated word learning in bilingual infants, very little is known about the representational structures underlying bilingual infants' developing lexical and semantic knowledge. The PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations) theoretical framework of infant speech perception and word learning (Werker & Curtin, 2005) has recently been extended to bilingual acquisition (Curtin, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker, accepted; Werker, Curtin, & Byers-Heinlein, 2010). This proposal will test several central predictions made by PRIMIR, investigating a) whether the bilinguals' two languages are initially differentiated or are initially conflated, b) whether the structure of bilingual infants' lexicons depends on vocabulary size, c) whether there are differences between bilinguals' dominant and their non-dominant language, d) whether cognate words have a special status in the lexicon, e) whether lexical structure is different for infants whose parents engage in frequent language mixing, and f) whether the structure of the bilingual lexicon is continuous or discontinuous across development. To examine these questions, I propose four sets of studies using an infant looking task in conjunction with eye tracking. This proposal makes a novel methodological contribution by combining approaches from adult psycholinguistic research with infant testing techniques. Beyond advancing theory and methodology in language acquisition and psycholinguistics, this research program also provides an entry into studying applied issues in language policy and education.

为了成功地习得语言，在双语环境中长大的婴儿必须同时对两种不同语言的输入进行编码。我的研究重点是双语婴儿如何导航，学习和代表他们的两种语言，作为早期语言经验如何塑造语言习得的窗口。本研究探讨了一岁后语言习得的一个重要组成部分：词汇习得。虽然有一些研究调查了双语婴儿的词汇学习，但对双语婴儿发展词汇和语义知识的表征结构知之甚少。婴儿言语感知和单词学习的PRIMIR （Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations，多维互动表征）理论框架（Werker & Curtin, 2005）最近被扩展到双语习得（Curtin, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker，接受；Werker, Curtin, & Byers-Heinlein, 2010）。本研究将对PRIMIR的几个中心预测进行检验，包括：a)双语者的两种语言是最初分化还是最初合并，b)双语婴儿的词汇结构是否取决于词汇量，c)双语者的优势语和非优势语是否存在差异，d)同源词在词汇中是否具有特殊地位。E)父母频繁混合语言的婴儿的词汇结构是否不同；f)在整个发展过程中，双语词汇结构是连续的还是不连续的。为了检验这些问题，我提出了四组研究，将婴儿注视任务与眼动追踪相结合。本研究将成人心理语言学研究方法与婴儿测试技术相结合，在方法论上做出了新的贡献。除了推进语言习得和心理语言学的理论和方法外，本研究项目还提供了一个研究语言政策和教育应用问题的入口。