DDIG: Commitment and Flexibility in the Developing Parser

语言学习者必须识别语言输入中不同语言的语言属性，最近的研究已经探索了语言输入中的分布特征对成功学习的潜在重要性。然而，其他最近的研究结果表明，儿童的不成熟的语言理解系统是容易错误的输入解析。这增加了学习者可能错过信息分布信息的可能性：如果儿童错误分析输入中的句子，那么从成人和研究人员的角度来看，真实的输入分布可能与“摄入”不同，即，有效的输入分配，反馈到语言学习机制。本研究通过对英语和日语疑问句的增量句法分析和再分析来探讨这一问题。在Colin菲利普斯博士和Jeffrey Lidz博士的指导下，Akira Omaki先生将使用眼动追踪、故事后提问和英语和日语的真理价值判断措施进行研究，以评估a）儿童是否像成人一样，对问题的解释做出早期承诺（“主动依赖处理”），和B）儿童是否能够成功地重新分析的情况下，他们最初的解释是不正确的。实验结果将补充语料库分析和计算建模研究将与实验结果相结合，以产生一个估计如何分布的疑问句结构出现从一个孩子的角度。该项目的一个新的特点是，它结合了实验和基于语料库的方法，以了解儿童的语言理解系统可能会导致他们理解的分布不符合什么是实际存在于他们的输入。因此，该项目的一个更广泛的影响是，它可能对任何强调语言习得过程中分布性学习的作用的研究产生重要影响。该项目的第二个更广泛的影响是，它将有助于建立新的合作伙伴关系，在发展与学龄前学校的机构联系的基础上，对日语的语言习得研究，并将促进未来的比较语言习得研究的国际合作。

Language learners must identify linguistic properties that differ across languages in the language input that surrounds them, and much recent research has explored the potential importance of distributional regularities in the language input for successful learning. However, other recent findings on child sentence understanding have shown that children's immature language comprehension system is prone to mis-parsing of the input. This raises the possibility that informative distributional information might be missed by the learner: if a child misanalyzes sentences in the input, then the true input distribution from the perspective of adults and researchers may be different from the 'intake', i.e., the effective input distribution that feeds into the language learning mechanism. This project investigates this issue through studies of incremental sentence parsing and reanalysis in question constructions in English and Japanese. Under the direction of Dr. Colin Phillips and Dr. Jeffrey Lidz, Mr. Akira Omaki will conduct studies using eye-tracking, question-after-story and truth value judgment measures in English and Japanese in order to assess a) whether children, like adults, make early commitments to the interpretation of questions ('active dependency processing'), and b) whether children are able to successfully reanalyze in cases where their initial interpretation turns out to be incorrect. The experimental findings will be supplemented with a corpus analysis and a computational modeling study will be combined with the experimental findings, in order to generate an estimate of how the distribution of wh-question constructions appears from a child's perspective. A novel feature of the project is that it combines experimental and corpus-based approaches to gain an understanding of how children's language comprehension system might lead them to apprehend distributional regularities that do not correspond to what is actually present in their input. Thus, one broader impact of the project is that it could have important implications for any research that emphasizes the role of distributional regularities in the language acquisition process. A second broader impact of the project is that it will help to establish new partnerships for language acquisition research on Japanese, based on developing institutional connections with preschools, and will facilitate future international collaborations on comparative language acquisition studies.