COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Origins of Verb Learning

对象、行为和事件是人类经验的物理组成部分。虽然我们对婴幼儿如何思考和谈论物体了解很多，但我们对他们如何思考和谈论行为却知之甚少。动作是组织事件的粘合剂。当球棒击球时，击球的动作定义了两个物体之间的关系。同样，动词是句子的“英雄”，句子的其余部分都围绕着它组织起来。这个项目考察了婴幼儿将动作概念化和将语言与动作联系起来的方式。这里提出了两个问题。第一个问题是儿童如何感知和形成行动类别。例如，为什么我们会把祖母的跑步行为和卡尔·刘易斯的行为归为同一类呢？第二个问题是我们如何给这些行为类别贴上标签。例如，孩子们是否认为“跑步”这个词只适用于他们看到的第一个做这个动作的人？或者，他们从一开始就知道跑步既适用于他们看到的第一个跑步的人，也适用于他们的祖母和卡尔·刘易斯？这个基金是第一个解决这些关于语言和思想的关键问题的基金。因此，它代表了理解儿童如何学习语言，特别是他们如何谈论他们所看到的行为的新前沿。

PI: Golinkoff, R.M.BCS-9912103Objects, actions and events are the physical building blocks of human experience. While we know a great deal about how infants and toddlers think and talk about objects, we know very little about how they think and talk about actions. Actions are the glue around which events are organized. When a bat strikes a ball, it is the act of striking that defines the relationship between the two objects. Similarly, the verb is the "hero" of the sentence around which the rest of the sentence is organized. This project examines the ways in which infants and toddlers conceptualize action and link language to actions. Two questions are posed. The first asks how children perceive and form categories of action. Why, for example do we categorize an act of running by our grandmother as the same sort of action as that performed by Carl Lewis? The second question asks how we attach labels to those categories of action. For example, do children think that the word "running" only applies to the first person they saw performing that action? Or, do they know from the start that running applies both to the first person they saw running as well as to their grandmother and to Carl Lewis? This grant is the among the first to address these key questions about language and thought. As such, it represents a new frontier toward understanding how children learn language and in particular, how they talk about the actions they see.