The nature of first word combinations: insights from the comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement and tense-marking by young native French-speaking children

“第一个词组合的本质：来自法语母语儿童对主谓一致和时态标记的理解和产生的见解”【摘要】掌握母语是一项巨大的成就。大多数3岁的孩子已经对周围的语言交流有了扎实的理解，而且，在他们不断扩大的词汇量的限制下，他们也有了用这种语言表达自己的重要能力。这就产生了四个主要问题：他们是如何走到这一步的？他们从哪里开始？他们在生产（他们使用的形式）和理解（他们理解的形式）中表现出相同的模式吗？有多少与他们正在学习的语言的特定语法属性有关？很少有不矛盾的答案存在，这在很大程度上是因为在很小的孩子身上测试语言理解能力是出了名的困难。在语言学项目和国际科学与工程办公室的资助下，Geraldine Legendre博士和Isabelle Barriere博士将使用最近开发的非侵入性实验方法来寻求这些问题和其他相关问题的答案。通过测量观看与视频匹配或不匹配的短音频描述的短视频的持续时间，这些方法被用于测试非常年幼的儿童学习英语的语言理解能力。研究小组将把这种方法应用到学习法语的儿童的测试中，因为法语比英语有更丰富的时态、人称、性别区分系统。这项从跨语言角度对幼儿理解能力的新颖研究将为有关第一语言习得的争论提供信息，并试图解决有关第一语言习得的矛盾主张。更广泛的影响包括通过建立典型生产和理解的基准来推进非典型语言发展的诊断，为约翰霍普金斯大学的本科生和研究生创造研究机会，并促进与国外研究团体的科学对话。

"The Nature of first word combinations: insights from the comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement and tense-marking by young native French-speaking children"AbstractAcquiring one's native language is a tremendous achievement. Most 3 year olds already exhibit both a solid understanding of the linguistic exchanges that surround them, and also, within the limits set by their expanding vocabulary, a significant ability to express themselves in that language. Four main questions arise: How do they get to this point? Where do they start? Do they exhibit the same patterns in production (the forms theyuse) and comprehension (the forms they understand)? How much is tied to the particular grammatical properties of the language they are acquiring? Few non-contradictory answers exist, in large part because of the notorious difficulty of testing linguistic comprehension in very young children. With funding from the Linguistics Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering, Dr. Geraldine Legendre and Dr. Isabelle Barriere will seek answers to these and other related questions using recently developed non-invasive experimental methods. Based on measuring the duration of gazing at short videos paired with short audio descriptions that match or do not match the videos, these methods have been used to test linguistic comprehension in very young children acquiring English. The research team will apply such methods to the testing of children acquiring French, a language which has a richer system of marking tense, person, and gender distinctions than English. This novel study of comprehension in young children from a cross-linguistic perspective will inform the debate on, and attempt to resolve contradictory claims pertaining to, first language acquisition. Broader impacts include advancing the diagnostic of atypical linguistic development by establishing a benchmark for both typical production and comprehension, creating research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students at Johns Hopkins University, and fostering scientific dialogue with research communities abroad.