The influence of fantastical discourse context on young children's on-line sentence comprehension

奇幻话语语境对幼儿网络句子理解的影响

• 批准号: RGPIN-2016-05603
• 负责人: Ganea, Patricia
• 金额: $ 2.26万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=651488
• 关键词: influence; fantastical; discourse; context; young

Children encounter many fantastical events in stories (e.g. Peter Pan takes off and flies). When preschoolers are asked explicit questions about how stories work, they show their understanding that events in fiction can contradict what they know about the way events happen in the real world. However, children's answers to explicit questions often differ significantly from their interpretation of events in real time. *******The general goal of this research program is to investigate children's moment-by-moment interpretations of language as a fantastical discourse unfolds. First, we will ask whether children rely upon events in fiction, rather than their real-world knowledge, when they listen to a story. We will present five-year-olds with stories featuring fantastical characters and improbable events (e.g. an elf who doesn't get around on a bicycle, but on a vacuum) and then show them images including a vacuum and a bicycle while they hear (e.g.) ‘Elliott the elf is riding the vacuum'. Once children hear ‘riding', will they look more at the bicycle – an object that often accompanies the word ‘ride', and the kind of object that people ride in the real world – or to the vacuum, drawing on the context from the story? In other words, will children rely on Elliott's unusual preference to anticipate the way that the final sentence will unfold? By manipulating story background, characters, and events, drawing the real and narrative worlds closer together or emphasizing their distance, we will discover which kinds of breaks with the real world influence children's ability to rely on a fantastical discourse in real time. Second, we are interested to know how the new fictional information influences children's later interpretations of language in a new context. Are the new (fantastical) semantic relationships – such as the pairing of ‘ride' and ‘vacuum' - quarantined and forgotten after a story is over, or do they inform children's expectations about upcoming language in new contexts (such as a different elf or an ordinary girl)? Third, we will explore the relationship between children's performance and certain other skills. It may be easier for children to suppress their day-to-day predictions about language, and instead use the story context, if their ability to inhibit learned responses is strong. Conversely, it may be more difficult for children who have a deep understanding of the way words are related to one another to override what they know and rely on the story to make predictions about upcoming language.******Our long term goal is to develop a comprehensive account of how language that contradicts children's learned knowledge of the real world is processed in real-time. By asking how children process language in a discourse context and discovering the cognitive and linguistic processes involved, we will enable the creation of more sensitive methods for assessing children's narrative comprehension.**

孩子们在故事中遇到了许多奇幻的事件(例如彼得·潘起飞和飞行)。当学龄前儿童被问到关于故事是如何运作的明确问题时，他们表明了他们的理解，即小说中的事件可能与他们所知道的现实世界中发生的事件的方式相矛盾。然而，孩子们对露骨问题的回答往往与他们对事件的实时解读有很大不同。*这个研究项目的总体目标是调查儿童在幻想的话语展开时对语言的每一刻的理解。首先，我们会问孩子们在听故事时是否依赖于小说中的事件，而不是他们在现实世界中的知识。我们将给五岁的孩子们讲一些关于奇幻人物和不太可能发生的事件的故事(例如，一个不骑自行车而是骑吸尘器的精灵)，然后在他们听到的时候向他们展示包括吸尘器和自行车在内的图像(例如)。“小精灵埃利奥特坐在吸尘器上。”一旦孩子们听到“骑”，他们会更多地看自行车--一个经常伴随着“骑”这个词的物体，以及人们在现实世界中骑的那种物体--还是根据故事的背景去看真空？换句话说，孩子们会依靠埃利奥特不同寻常的偏好来预测最后一句话的展开方式吗？通过操纵故事背景、人物和事件，将现实世界和叙事世界拉近，或者强调它们的距离，我们将发现与现实世界的哪种断裂影响了儿童实时依赖幻想话语的能力。其次，我们有兴趣了解在新的语境下，新的虚构信息如何影响儿童后来对语言的理解。故事结束后，新的(奇幻的)语义关系是孤立的，被遗忘的吗？还是会影响孩子们在新的语境中对即将到来的语言的期待(比如不同的精灵或普通的女孩)？第三，我们将探索儿童的表现与某些其他技能之间的关系。如果儿童抑制习得反应的能力很强，他们可能更容易抑制他们对语言的日常预测，而是使用故事背景。相反，对于对单词相互关联有深刻理解的孩子来说，他们可能更难超越他们所知道的，依靠故事来预测即将到来的语言。我们的长期目标是建立一个全面的描述，说明与儿童学习的真实世界知识相矛盾的语言是如何实时处理的。通过询问儿童如何在话语语境中处理语言，并发现其中涉及的认知和语言过程，我们将能够创造出更敏感的方法来评估儿童的叙事理解能力。