Doctoral Dissertation Research: Learning attitude verb meanings

具备较强的语言能力对于成为一名富有成效的社会成员至关重要。然而，对于没有任何语言的幼儿如何学习这种复杂而关键的能力，仍然有许多悬而未决的问题。这些问题的答案不仅具有教育意义，还可能为认知-语言障碍的日益普遍以及学习结果中基于社会经济地位的差异等问题的根本原因提供重要的见解。本论文研究的问题涉及幼儿如何学习动词的意义：动词是语言句子的核心，因此了解动词是如何习得的是理解儿童如何更广泛地学习语言的关键。有些动词对孩子来说比其他的更难学。例如，像“跑”和“打”这样的动作动词比像“相信”和“想要”这样的心理动词学习得更早。“相信”和“想要”的一个原因可能是，我们可以看到和听到跑步和撞击事件，而不能看到或听到思考和想要的事情。尽管如此，孩子们还是学会了这些动词，所以除了感官之外，肯定还有一条路要走。这项研究使用语言学理论、认知科学和计算机科学的方法来调查这条路线是什么，以检验一个有希望的提议：儿童使用动词出现的句子上下文来推断它的意义。这项研究将考察儿童如何利用这样一个事实，即句子上下文中的相似似乎对应于动词意义上的相似。为了回答这个问题，本研究将利用实验方法来衡量语境信息对动词学习的影响。研究人员将在使用机械土耳其进行数据收集的人工语法学习实验中测量这些对表现的影响。研究人员将把这些实验的结果合并到一个认知过程的计算模型中，该模型允许儿童学习单词。第二步在科学上和实践上都是有用的。一方面，这将导致对语言学习背后的心理过程的更深层次的理解。另一方面，它将提供一个认知发展模型，帮助预测与儿童交谈的语言的差异--例如，那些受社会经济地位制约的语言--对语言学习结果的影响。

Having strong linguistic ability is crucial for becoming a productive member of society. However, there remain many unanswered questions regarding how young children, who start out with no language whatsoever, learn this complex and crucial ability. The answer to these questions not only has educational ramifications but may also provide important insights into the root causes of such matters as the increased prevalence of cognitive-linguistic disorders and socioeconomic-status-based differences in learning outcomes. The issues examined in this dissertation project relate to how young children learn the meanings of verbs: Verbs constitute the core of a language's sentences, so understanding how verbs are learned is key to understanding how children learn language more generally. Some verbs are harder for children to learn than others. For instance, action verbs like "run" and "hit" are learned earlier than mental verbs like "believe" and "want". One reason "believe" and "want" might be learned later is that, whereas we can see and hear running and hitting events, we can't see or hear thinking and wanting. Children nevertheless learn these verbs, so a route other than the senses must exist. This research investigates what that route is using methods from linguistic theory, cognitive science, and computer science to examine one promising proposal: that children use the sentence contexts a verb occurs in to infer its meaning. The research will examine theories of how children leverage the fact that similarity in sentence context seems to correspond to similarity in verb meaning. To answer this question, this research will exploit experimental methods for measuring the effect of contextual information on verb learning. The investigators will measure these effects on performance in artificial grammar learning experiments using Mechanical Turk for data collection. The researchers will incorporate the findings from these experiments into a computational model of the cognitive processes that allow children to learn words. This second step is useful both scientifically and practically. On the one hand, it will result in a deeper understanding of the mental processes that underlie language learning. On the other, it will provide a model of cognitive development that will help predict the effect that differences in the language spoken to children--for instance, those conditioned by socioeconomic status--have on language learning outcomes.