Doctoral Dissertation Research: Causal Representations in Children's Transitive Sentences

这个博士论文研究改进补助金将支持博士生梅丽莎·克莱恩在爱德华·吉布森博士指导下的工作。句子的结构包含其含义的线索。 像“The dax gorped the blicket to the voom”这样的无意义句子允许一些初步的猜测：“gorping”可能意味着发送或转移。本研究将探讨儿童如何学习句子意义与句子形式相匹配的规则。 这个问题的一个重要测试是一个基本的句子类型，及物句（例如“简打破了灯。在各种语言中，及物性句子都被可靠地用来描述因果事件，但有些语言，如英语，也允许其他类型的含义（例如，“简喜欢那盏灯。“）即便如此，成年人说话时还是倾向于期待新的及物动词来指代因果事件。 孩子们会用类似的策略来帮助他们学习新的动词吗？ 根据孩子们的学习偏见和他们从父母那里听到的信息，孩子们可能会对新的动词含义做出与成年人截然不同的猜测。为了测试这些问题，我们将研究幼儿对一个新单词（如“大兴”）的含义的猜测。Co-PI Kline还将使用对话记录来比较这些猜测与父母实际对孩子说的传递性句子。 目前，我们知道孩子们对某些场景有着广泛的偏好，以匹配及物性句子：一个女孩推着一个男孩在独轮车是一个更好的猜测“女孩daxed男孩”比一个女孩和一个男孩分别挥舞着他们的手臂。 在这项研究中，Kline女士将利用对因果感知的了解来创建密切匹配的场景对比，以发现儿童与及物动词相关联的特定线索和特征。这个项目将有助于我们了解儿童如何学习动词和句子结构，以及概念表征如何与语言相关。资助这个项目也有助于培养一名研究生。

This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant will support the work of doctoral student Melissa Kline under the direction of Dr. Edward Gibson.The structures of sentences contain clues to their meanings. A nonsense sentence like "The dax gorped the blicket to the voom" allows for some initial guesses: 'gorping' probably means something about sending or transferring. The research carried out in this project will address the issue of how children learn the rules that match sentence meanings with sentence form. An important test for this question is a basic sentence type, the transitive sentence (e.g. "Jane broke the lamp.") Across languages, transitive sentences are reliably used to describe causal events, but some languages like English also allow for other kinds of meanings (e.g. "Jane liked the lamp.") Even so, adult speakers tend to expect new transitive verbs to refer to causal events. Do children use a similar strategy to help them learn new verbs? Depending on the learning biases children use and the input they hear from their parents, children might make very different guesses than adults about new verb meanings.To test these questions we will examine the guesses that toddlers make about the meaning of a novel word like 'daxing.' Co-PI Kline will also use conversation transcripts to compare these guesses to the transitive sentences that parents actually say to their children. Currently, we know that children have a broad preference for certain scenes to match with transitive sentences: a girl pushing a boy in a wheelbarrow is a better guess for "The girl daxed the boy" than a girl and a boy waving their arms separately. In this research Ms. Kline will use what is known about causal perception to create closely matched scene contrasts to discover the specific cues and features that children associate with transitive verbs. This project will contribute to our understanding of how children learn verbs and sentence structures and of how conceptual representations are related to language. Funding this project also contributes to the training of a graduate student.