Doctoral Dissertation Research: Infant Event Representations and Verb Argument Structure

在国家科学基金会的支持下，谢尔夫和她的顾问佩尔菲蒂博士将进行为期一年的调查，研究语言前婴儿在观察到的事件中识别出与动词论元结构相同的结构的可能性。动词论元结构是一种描述语言事件的高度受限的格式。婴儿将世界上的事件映射到“给予”和“拥抱”等概念上的能力引发了语言结构和事件感知的问题。作为成年人，我们隐含地从物体之间复杂甚至模棱两可的相互作用的场景中识别离散事件。此外，我们以非常一致的方式对这些事件进行口头描述，将我们对事件的认知表征与我们对事件的语言表征联系起来。这一过程的困难在于，虽然可以想象的事件的世界可能相当不受限制，但语言本身是一种高度受限制的表示事件的格式。那么，获得语言的婴儿如何学会将约束较少的世界映射到高度约束的语言结构上呢？Scherff和Perfetti将研究婴儿的事件知觉和动词论元结构的习得，这些婴儿包括言语前婴儿(10-12个月)和刚刚开始产生单词组合的婴儿(18-20个月)。他们的项目集中在婴儿是否根据必须参加的人数对事件进行概念性分类，这一操作可能对习得具有不同论元结构的动词至关重要。使用对儿童对新奇事件的感知敏感的方法，Scherff和Perfetti将研究婴儿对事件结构的知识如何与语言论点结构相对应。他们还将研究感知和认知机制对婴儿事件表征的潜在贡献，以及语言习得如何影响婴儿的事件知识。通过记录头皮上的电位，研究人员对婴儿大脑中感知事件结构的位置有了大致的了解。这种方法和研究问题的结合可以独特地帮助我们理解婴儿是如何在他们对事件的认知表征和语言习得过程之间形成桥梁的。这项工作将增加关于人类在生命早期如何发展认知和语言功能的知识。

With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Scherff and her advisor Dr. Perfetti will conduct a year long investigation of the possibility that prelinguistic infants identify the same kinds of structures in observed events that languages identify with verb argument structure. The verb argument structure is a highly constrained format for describing events in language. Infants' ability to map events in the world onto concepts such as "give" and "hug" raises questions about both the structure of language and of event perception. As adults, we implicitly identify discrete events from a scene of complex and even ambiguous interactions among objects. Further, we verbally characterize these events in remarkably consistent ways, relating our cognitive representations of events to our linguistic representations of events. The difficulty in this process is that while the world of conceivable events may be fairly unconstrained, language itself is a highly constrained format for representing events. How then, do infants acquiring language learn to map the less constrained world onto highly constrained linguistic structures? Scherff and Perfetti will investigate infant event perception and the acquisition of verb argument structure in preverbal infants (10-12 months) and infants just beginning to produce word combinations (18-20 months). Their project focuses on whether infants' conceptually categorize events based on the number of obligatory participants, an operation that might be critical for acquiring verbs with different argument structure. Using methods sensitive to a child's perception of novel events, Scherff and Perfetti will examine how infants' knowledge of event structures correspond to linguistic argument structures. They will also examine the underlying contributions of perceptual and cognitive mechanisms to infants' event representations and how language acquisition impacts infant event knowledge. By recording electrical potentials at the scalp, the investigators gain a rough idea of where in the infant brain perceived events structures are represented.This combination of methodologies and research questions can uniquely inform our understanding of how infants form bridges between their cognitive representations of events and the language acquisition process. This work will increase knowledge about how the cognitive and language functions of humans develop in the very early stages of life.