Early word learning in English- and Mandarin-acquiring infants

人类具有独特的自然能力，能够构建复杂、灵活和创造性的概念和语言系统。这个项目提供了一个窗口，通过它可以查看这两个独特的人类系统之间的联系——跨开发和跨语言。人类婴儿的一项重要发展任务是形成概念，捕捉他们遇到的物体和事件之间的共性和关系，并学习用单词来表达它们。甚至在婴儿开始说话之前，这些发展任务就强有力地联系在一起。婴儿以一种广泛的、普遍的期望开始单词学习的任务。这为更具体的期望的出现奠定了基础，将特定类型的单词（例如，名词，动词）与特定类型的意义（例如，基于对象和事件的共性）联系起来。这些更具体的期望在头两年以层叠的方式出现，由婴儿的母语结构调整。过去的研究强调了婴儿广泛的早期期望和他们的母语环境的塑造作用之间至关重要的相互作用。当前项目的首要目标是集中在两种类型的证据上——发展和跨语言——这将揭示单词和概念之间的联系是如何展开的。这些实验聚焦于婴儿出生后的第二年，追踪了婴儿在学习英语或普通话时对两种词汇的习得——名词和动词。来自普通话的证据提供了与英语明确的语言对照，并将首次涉及一个长期存在的争论，即婴儿的词汇和概念发展是否以及如何受到语言习得的影响。结果将提供一个详细的分析婴儿在概念和单词学习的新兴能力。采用最先进的时间序列分析，该项目将精确地确定18个月和24个月大的婴儿在将新单词映射到意义的过程中是如何分配他们的视觉注意力的。该项目不仅将阐明特定年龄的婴儿是否能够成功地学习新单词的含义，还将阐明他们学习新单词的效率。这项研究将导致科学知识的根本性进步。以英语和普通话为重点，它将首次确定这些截然不同的环境语言对婴儿语言和概念发展的影响。此外，还有一个强有力的培训组成部分，目的是使代表性不足的群体的成员参与研究进程。通过阐明两种不同语言的发展模式和过程，该项目将为更好地理解婴儿如何学习英语以外的语言学习单词和概念提供一种方法。这将推动国家努力促进美国越来越多的来自非英语家庭环境的婴幼儿的积极发展结果。通过识别成功的单词学习所需的视觉和语言支持的种类，这项基础研究也可以作为一个跳板，为被诊断为语言迟缓或障碍的婴幼儿开发有针对性的干预措施。调整信息的数量和种类，利用这些孩子的优势，可能在治疗中特别有效。

Humans are uniquely endowed with a natural capacity for building complex, flexible, and creative conceptual and linguistic systems. This project provides a window through which to view the link between these two uniquely human systems -- across development and across languages. An essential developmental task for human infants is to form concepts that capture the commonalities and relations among the objects and events they encounter, and to learn words to express them. Even before infants begin to speak, these developmental tasks are powerfully linked. Infants begin the task of word learning with a broad, universal expectation. This sets the stage for the emergence of more specific expectations, linking particular kinds of words (e.g., noun, verb) to particular kinds of meaning (e.g., object- and event-based commonalities). These more specific expectations emerge in a cascading fashion over the first two years, tuned by the structure of the infant's native language. Past research has underscored the vital interaction between infants' broad early expectations and the shaping role of their native language environment. The overarching goal of the current project is to concentrate on the two types of evidence -- developmental and cross-linguistic -- that will reveal how the links between words and concepts unfold. Focusing on the second year of life, the experiments trace the acquisition of two kinds of words -- nouns and verbs -- in infants acquiring either English or Mandarin. Evidence from Mandarin offers a clear linguistic counterpoint to English and will engage, for the first time, a long-standing debate concerning whether and how infants' lexical and conceptual development are shaped by the language being acquired. The results will provide a detailed analysis of infants' emerging capacities in concept and word learning. Recruiting state-of-the-art time-series analyses, the project will identify with precision how 18- and 24-month-old infants deploy their visual attention as they are engaged in the very process of mapping novel words to meaning. The project will also clarify not only whether infants at a particular age can successfully learn new word meanings, but will also shed light on the efficiency with which they do so. This research will lead to fundamental advancements in scientific knowledge. Focusing on English and Mandarin, it will identify, for the first time, the impact of these distinctly different ambient languages on infants' language and conceptual development. In addition, there is a strong training component aimed at bringing members of underrepresented groups into the research process. By illuminating developmental patterns and processes in two distinct languages, this project will provide a means to better understanding how infants acquiring languages other than English learn words and concepts. This will advance the nation's efforts to promote positive developmental outcomes for the ever-increasing number of infants and young children in the U.S. from non-English-speaking home environments. By identifying the kinds of visual and linguistic support required for successful word learning, this basic research may also serve as a springboard for developing targeted interventions for infants and young children diagnosed with language delay or impairments. Tailoring the amount and kind information to capitalize on these children's strengths may prove especially effective in treatment.