"Science Live!" Workshop on the Acquisition of Recursion across Languages; Holland - July, 2015

该项目将组织一系列研讨会，最终将在博物馆举办关于儿童习得语法递归的展览。展览将作为科学现场直播的一部分展出！该项目将于2015年夏天在阿姆斯特丹的尼莫科学博物馆展出，稍后将与美国和海外的其他博物馆和学校共享。其目的是通过让博物馆参观者参与正在进行的数据收集以及关于研究主题的示范和学习经验来教育他们关于研究的知识。递归是“把东西放进自己里面”的过程，就像俄罗斯玩偶在玩偶里玩偶一样。递归例程通常存在于计算机程序中，是学习数字系统的基础--创建n、(n+1)、((n+1)+1)等序列。在生成语法中，它是将有意义的小单元重新组合成无限种类的大结构的机制。所有语言都有递归的基本形式，而其他形式因语言而异。例如，很少有语言像英语那样允许递归所有格短语，一个3岁的孩子说：“你是我妈妈的妈妈。”将所有格放入所有格中的递归过程原则上可以无限期地持续下去。尽管它很重要，但令人惊讶的是，人们对各种语言中的特定递归结构是如何以及何时获得的了解很少。拟议展览的目的是利用动手、非正式学习的原则，将抽象的递归概念转化为具体的经验，供不同年龄和背景的人使用。这些实验是该项目的核心，通过在iPad上使用动手应用程序提供引人入胜的活动，通过这些活动，可以探索儿童理解递归结构的含义和限制的微妙方面。IPad协议的简单性和灵活性使研究人员能够测试不同年龄段的各种结构，并进一步询问学习者概括到什么抽象水平。通过展览，研究人员将从参观博物馆的人那里收集实验证据，以验证他们的假设；实际实验之后的演示将让儿童和他们的照顾者参与到类似于日本、加拿大、荷兰、德国和巴西土著人民给世界各地儿童的挑战中，并将帮助他们理解是什么使我们成为人类的这个基本维度。通过强调所有人类语言所需表示的抽象性，该项目将致力于消除对所谓的“原始”语言的负面刻板印象，这些语言有时声称缺乏递归的基本属性。

This project will organize a series of workshops that will culminate in a museum exhibit on children's acquisition of recursion in grammar. The exhibit will be presented as part of the Science Live! program at the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam in summer 2015, and later will be shared with other museums and schools in the U.S. and abroad. The goal is to educate museum-goers about research by having them participate in on-going data collection as well as demonstrations and learning experiences on the topic of the research. Recursion is the process of "putting something inside itself," much like Russian dolls within dolls within dolls. Recursive routines are commonly found in computer programs and are the basis for learning the number system--creating the series of n, (n+1), ((n+1) +1), etc. In a generative grammar, it is the mechanism by which small meaningful units are recombined into an unlimited variety of larger structures. All languages have the basic form of recursion, while other forms vary from language to language. For example, few languages allow recursive possessive phrases the way English does, illustrated by a 3-year-old who said: "You are my Mom's Mom." The recursive process of putting a possessive inside a possessive could, in principle, continue indefinitely.Despite its importance, surprisingly little is understood about how and when the specific recursive structures found in various languages are acquired. The goal of the proposed exhibit is to use the principles of hands-on, informal learning to translate the abstract concept of recursion into concrete experiences for people of many different ages and backgrounds. The experiments which are the heart of this project provide engaging activities using hands-on apps on an iPad through which subtle aspects of children's understanding of the meanings and limits of recursive structures can be explored. The simplicity and flexibility of the iPad protocol permit the researcher to test a variety of structures across a wide range of ages, and ask further, at what level of abstraction learners generalize. Through the exhibit, the investigators will gather experimental evidence from museum-goers to test their hypotheses; the demonstrations that follow the actual experiments will engage children and their caregivers in challenges similar to those given to children around the world by colleagues in Japan, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and among indigenous peoples in Brazil, and will help them understand this fundamental dimension of what makes us human. By emphasizing the abstractness of representations required for all human languages, the project will work to counteract negative stereotypes about so-called 'primitive' languages, sometimes claimed to lack the fundamental property of recursion.