From Words to Inferences: The Development of Incremental Language Comprehension

几十年的研究表明，成年人的听者能够迅速地整合各种信息，确定话语中词与词之间的句法和语义关系。然而，对儿童语言加工的研究还处于起步阶段。这在很大程度上是因为大多数用于研究成人理解的方法都涉及阅读或对幼儿来说太难的次要任务。近年来，这种情况发生了变化：一些研究人员已经证明，儿童的眼球运动可以提供有关口语理解过程中每时每刻的详细信息。 本项目将在这些初步研究结果的基础上，使用眼睛注视范式来研究3至7岁儿童的句法、语义和语用过程。 PI将研究三个具体问题：第一，儿童使用什么信息来确定话语的句法结构？ 儿童对歧义句的解释将被用来探讨韵律，词汇知识和语义可解释性的作用。 第二，在语言理解过程中使用了哪些语法表征？ 启动范式将被用来探索这些结构类别的性质和范围。第三，儿童的语言理解是否为话语的意义（语义学）和我们听到它时所做的推断（语用学）之间的理论区别提供了任何证据？ 儿童的眼动将被分析，以确定他们是否自发地作出语用推理时，听明确的话语。 虽然语言理解系统的发展本身就很重要，但这项工作也将深入了解：儿童的句法表征，成人语言处理的架构，单词学习和句法发展之间的关系。这项研究将绘制出更高层次的语言理解过程的发展。 强大的语言理解能力对认知和社会发展至关重要。口语是幼儿社会化和接受教育的主要手段。他们对遥远的地方、家庭关系和抽象实体的知识主要是通过听成年人的话发展起来的。识字还建立在儿童理解口语的能力之上，学前语言理解和后来的阅读能力之间存在着强有力的联系。通过追踪这些语言理解过程的发展，从三岁开始，这项研究可以深入了解为什么有些孩子似乎在理解方面有很大的困难，以及可以做些什么来促进这些技能的发展。随着这个项目的进行，它将为一些研究生和本科生提供独特的教育机会。

Decades of research has demonstrated that adult listeners rapidly integrate many kinds of information to determine the syntactic and semantic relations between words in an utterance. The study of children's language processing, however, is still in its infancy. This is largely because most of the methods used to study adult comprehension involve reading or secondary tasks too difficult for young children. In recent years this has changed: Several researchers have demonstrated that children's eye-movements can provide detailed information about the moment-to-moment processes involved in spoken-language comprehension. The present project will build on these initial findings, using the eye-gaze paradigm to investigate syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic processes in children from 3 to 7 years of age. The PI will examine three specific questions: First, what information do children use to determine the syntactic structure of an utterance? Children's interpretation of ambiguous sentences will be used to explore the roles of prosody, word knowledge, and semantic plausibility. Second, what kinds of grammatical representations are used during language comprehension? A priming paradigm will be used to explore the nature and scope of these structural categories. Third, does children's language comprehension provide any evidence for the theoretical distinction between the meaning of an utterance (semantics) and the inferences that we make upon hearing it (pragmatics)? Children's eye-movements will be analyzed to determine whether they spontaneously make pragmatic inferences when listening to unambiguous utterances. Although the development of the language comprehension system is of importance in its own right, this work will also provide insight into: children's syntactic representations, the architecture of adult language processing, and the relation between word learning and syntactic development.This research will map out the development of higher-level language comprehension processes. Strong language comprehension skills are essential to cognitive and social development. Spoken language is the primary means by which young children are socialized and educated. Their knowledge of distant places, family relations, and abstract entities develops largely by listening to adults. Literacy also builds upon children's ability to understand spoken language, as evidenced by robust connections between preschool language comprehension and later reading abilities. By tracing the development of these language comprehension processes from three years of age, this research may provide insight into why some children seem to have great difficulties in comprehension and what can be done to facilitate the development of these skills. As this project proceeds, it will provide unique educational opportunities for several graduate and undergraduate students.